III.—On the Formation of Mountains, with a Critique on Captain Hutton's Lecture

Abstract

The subject of Captain Hutton's lecture, on the Formation of Mountains, delivered at Wellington, New Zealand, is one which has engaged a good deal of my attention, and was discussed by me in a paper read before the Cambridge Philosophical Society, and printed in their Transactions. In that paper I attributed the elevating force, which has raised mountain ranges, to the contraction of the heated interior of the earth, and subsequent wrinkling of the crust so as to accommodate itself to the diminished nucleus. This was an old hypothesis, but I believe the amount of horizontal pressure produced in that manner had not been estimated before. Mr. Mallet, the eminent seismologist, read a paper on the same subject before the Royal Society in May, 1872, in ignorance of what I had written, and came to the same conclusion as myself as to the amount of the horizontal pressure.