There seems to be no strong reason for doubting that every elementary substance of which we have any knowledge was separated at the first from that crude mass called “the earth,” and which, along with “the heaven,” God created in the beginning.
For, after that first assertion, we read of continued acts of “separation” by an Almighty fiat. Thus light is separated from darkness; waters from waters; water from earth. And by a like analogy we may suppose that the “firmament” or atmosphere, the lower part of which we breathe, was also eliminated in its component gases from the primitive shapeless bulk of matter.
If we take forty-five miles as the average height of this atmosphere above the surface of our globe, it is proportionately, like the thin rind upon an apple, or the bloom upon a peach; and may very well have come forth without any violence done to nature, or any waste of her resources, from the womb of the earth.
OXYGEN is a gas universally diffused, for without a large supply of it human beings and all the mammals, birds, and reptiles, would die. But oxygen is not a more simple element than CARBON or SILICON; and silicon is almost as universal, for it enters largely into the composition of all known rocks, excepting coal, limestone, and rock-salt.
Then, beside silicon and carbon, there is BORON, and many others, all of which will combine permanently with the principal gases, and which we may, therefore, fairly suppose did so in the beginning.
The oxygen which we breathe enters into composition with almost all known substances. It constitutes about one-fifth of the atmosphere, perhaps eight-ninths of the water, and helps chemically to compound all forms of earth and rock, and all the metals save five. Now this proclaims at once a kindred element, and does not look like a substance made independent of all the others at the first. Even potash and soda, which were long called “fixed alkalis,” having resisted all attempts to decompose them, yielded at last to a galvanic process, and were found to be compound; oxygen, in both cases, having united itself intimately with a metallic base.
It is probable, therefore, that every substance which we can handle, or of which we can recognize the presence by a chemical test, was as truly a part of the chaotic Earth as was the clay or the granite. The gaseous atmosphere or “firmament” was eliminated by an act of creation from the torpid mass, the waters were drawn off and gathered together, the rocks consolidated, the metals precipitated, most of the crystals were probably perfected by galvanic operations. But there is nothing, from the crystallized blocks of the mountains to the salt held in solution in the sea, from the heavy rain-cloud which darkens the sky to the gossamer films of vapour which fringe the outermost edge of our atmosphere, which was not actually present as an existing particle when the Earth, “Mother-Earth,” was made. And the EARTH, as we see, could very well furnish all these concomitant and subsidiary elements, without being impoverished at all. Indeed, as far as experiments and investigations proper have gone, we have as yet only touched the surface of our globe. The deepest mine which men have ever sunk into the bowels of the earth bears in its depth the same proportion to the earth’s radius, as a line, or one-eighth of an inch, bears to the height of the monument at London Bridge. Some of the exposed strata of rock, allowing for the tilting-up of their edges, certainly reveal a deeper sample than this; but still, it is like the prick of a pin on the hide of a rhinoceros; it does not even penetrate the creature’s folded hide; but of what lies within it tells us nothing.
Mr. Baily’s successful attempt at “weighing the Earth,” which, with consummate patience and skill, he brought to a termination in his house in Tavistock Square, has established the physical fact that this planet is not “a hollow sphere,” as some persons had supposed, but solid, probably to its very centre, and of considerable specific gravity. Here is a mighty mass of Matter; it may be, as Dr. Whewell has argued, the greatest mass (in solid contents) in our Solar system. What do we know of its interior construction, economy, and arrangement? Nothing, except that all obey the laws established by the Creator, whether those of gravitation, cohesive attraction, or chemical combination. The “statistical report” is wanting, especially in such departments as those of the Trap and Volcanic lavas.
The amount of SALT in the ocean is a circumstance which geologists have not, I think, sufficiently considered. This salt, if precipitated, would, it is believed, yield a solid range of mountains equal to that of the entire Himalaya. Now, mighty rivers run into the sea, as those of La Plata, Amazons, Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Orinoko, and many others; but none of these rivers are salt; they are enormous bodies of fresh water. How, then, does the ocean maintain everywhere its saline character unimpaired? not to ask, whence did so much salt come? There is, indeed, a hill of salt in Spain, and there are mines of rock-salt in Poland and Hungary; but the effort which was made, so to speak, when the proportion now existing in the ocean was squeezed out of the huge terrestrial sponge, must far have exceeded that of any subsequent addition or contribution.
The ocean itself, as girding this globe, is a prodigious mass of water, indeed. But, if we remember the size of the globe itself, as given by its diameter, Ocean appears like a rain-pond. For, if we call its average depth five miles—and it cannot be more than this, may be much less—such a watery envelope would be represented in its proportion to the solid sphere which it surrounds, by a coating of varnish of the thickness of this paper lying on a globe which is twenty feet in diameter.