Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot

by Philip Henry Gosse

The chief pelagic currents, which have hitherto so often been the destruction of the navigator, but which may yet become his able and subject servants, flow in circular systems. There is such an one in the southern part of the Indian Ocean, known as the Hurricane Region; another immense one ever running round and round the North Pacific; and, above all, that wondrous river of hot water—a river whose well-marked banks are not solid earth, but cold water—the Gulf Stream.

"The fruit of trees belonging to the torrid zone of America is annually cast ashore on the western coasts of Ireland and Norway. Pennant observes that the seeds of plants which grow in Jamaica, Cuba, and the adjacent countries, are collected on the shores of the Hebrides. Thither also barrels of French wine, the remains of vessels wrecked in the West Indian seas, have been carried. In 1809 His Majesty's ship Little Belt was dismasted at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and her bowsprit was found, eighteen months after, in the Basque Roads. The mainmast of the Tilbury, buried off Hispaniola in the Seven Years' war, was brought to our shores."[105]

These facts are dependent on the eastward set of this majestic current; and so is another great physical fact of immeasurable importance to us;—the superiority in temperature of the western shores of Europe over the eastern shores of North America. The harbour of St. John's, Newfoundland, is frequently fast closed by ice in the month of June; yet the latitude of St. John's is considerably south of that of the port of Brest, in France.

Impelled by the rotatory motion of the earth, and by the trade-wind,[106] the equatorial waters of the Atlantic are ever urged, a broad and rapid river, into the Caribbean sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, the narrowing shores of which compress the stream as in a funnel. The Andes here present a slender but impregnable barrier to its further progress westward; and the trend of the Isthmus turns it to the northward. Still finding no outlet, the impatient current, like a wild-beast pacing round its cage, courses the Gulf of Mexico, doubles the peninsula of Florida, and pursues its way first to the north-east, and then to the east, crossing the Atlantic in a retrograde direction, until it laves with its warm billows the coasts of Europe. Here it turns to the southward, and after embracing the "Fortunate" isles that lie off the African shores,—the Azores, the Madeiras, and the Canaries,—it joins the great equatorial set beneath the trade-wind, and returns on its westward course.

This mighty circulation of water must have been going on from the instant that the earth commenced rotating on its axis, or (granting this to have been chronologically subsequent) from the instant the Atlantic occupied its present bed. Whether sooner or later, it commenced at some instant; but at that instant all the previous elements of the circle were presupposed, and a boundless succession of former circles. An intelligent stranger, looking on the movement immediately after its commencement, but ignorant of its origin, would not be able to assign any limit to its past duration. From his observation of the velocity of the current in different parts of the circle, he would say with confidence,—"These identical particles of water, which I see now urged on their ceaseless course towards the middle of the North Atlantic, were, yesterday morning at this hour, in the latitude of the mouth of the Chesapeake; on the morning before, off Cape Hatteras, on the morning before that, off Cape Lookout;" and so backwards interminably.

Whether the economy of the globe is circular, or not, I am not in a position to show. But its movements certainly are; and so are the movements of all the myriad worlds with which astronomy is conversant. Asteroids, planets, satellites, comets, suns,—nay, even the stellar universe itself—obey in their motions, the grand universal law of circularity. Take any one of these;—our Moon. When its orbital motion commenced, it commenced at some point or other of the circle which it describes in its course around the earth. The pre-existence, or at least the co-existence, of the Earth, and also that of the Sun, are necessary to its motion. Supposing it possible for a spectator, furnished with modern astronomical knowledge, to have looked at that instant on the newly-spun orb, would he not confidently have inferred, from its position at that moment, its position a week before? Would he not have felt able to indicate with unhesitating certainty the solar and lunar eclipses of a century or a chiliad before, just as he now calculates the time of the eclipse that marked the death of Herod the Great? Undoubtedly he would; for he would assume the constancy of those movements which modern science has deduced from the observations of many centuries; and, granting him the fact of their constancy, we could not invalidate his conclusions. Yet what would he have shown? The conditions and phenomena of bodies before they had begun to exist. The conditions are legitimately deducible; but they are prochronic conditions.

The mention of the celestial orbs suggests to remembrance the famous argument for the vast antiquity of the material universe, founded on the time which is required for the propulsion of light. I believe it owes its origin to Sir William Herschel.

Speaking of the known velocity of light in connexion with the immense distance of certain nebulæ, that eminent astronomer made these remarks:—

"Hence it follows, that, when we... see an object of the calculated distance at which one of these very remote nebulæ may still be perceived... the rays of light which convey its image to the eye must have been more than nineteen hundred and ten thousand, that is, almost two millions, of years on their way; and that, consequently, so many years ago, this object must already have had an existence in the sidereal heavens, in order to send out those rays by which we now perceive it."[107]

The notion has been amplified, with some interesting details, by a writer in the Scottish Congregational Magazine for January 1847; who thus throws the statements into a tabular form, and comments on them.