Ethan Samuel Chapin

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MR. CHAPIN'S SCIENTIFIC VIEWS. Many of Mr. Chapin's ideas were both new and startling. If they are true, it is of the greatest importance that they be widely known. It is hoped that the foregoing sketch of his life, with the following notices of the, chief points in his theories, may be helpful in calling...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MR. CHAPIN'S SCIENTIFIC VIEWS. Many of Mr. Chapin's ideas were both new and startling. If they are true, it is of the greatest importance that they be widely known. It is hoped that the foregoing sketch of his life, with the following notices of the, chief points in his theories, may be helpful in calling attention to the importance of his work. Even those who never knew him will join in the wish that Mr.'Chapin may receive full credit for the service which, under unusual difficulties, he has rendered to the world in the line of scientific scholarship. The three most important topics treated in Mr. Chapin's books, and those which he discussed with the greatest originality, are Gravitation, The Physical Condition of Jupiter, and The Instability of the Earth's Axis. Mr. Chapin took the very advanced ground that gravitation determines the density, the temperature, and the fluid or solid condition of matter. Heat and gravity are correlative. When gravity is resisted, heatbecomes its equivalent. With these data it was comparatively easy for him to prove that the earth consists of a densely heated molten nucleus, surrounded by a thin crust of uniform thickness. For the past forty years the leading geologists, such as Sir Charles Lyell and Sir William Thomson, have generally held that the earth is a solid body. Only very recently has the tide of opinion begun to turn in the direction of the theory, held so strenuously by Mr. Chapin, that the centre of the earth must be a molten mass of such density that the surface, as it cooled, could not sink. The experiments used by Mr. Osmond Fisher, Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, and others, to prove this idea are just such as Mr. Chapin described when he fearlessly advanced his views. It is found to be a universal phenomeno...