WCP2455

[1]

Harlton

Cambridge

12 Aug 1892

My dear Sir,

I have read your article on the permanence of ocean basins in "Natural Science"¹ with much interest. I am grateful to you for the approving manner in which you refer to my book.² I am much struck with your diagram showing the relative volumes of land and water. I notice however that you have taken the mean height of the land at 2250 feet. When I was hunting up estimates of this for my first edition³ I found that Herschel⁴ following Humbolt⁵ [sic] had put it at 1800 feet & that Carrick Moore⁶ had reduced [2] this by half to 900. In my second edition I followed Haughton⁷ and took 1000 feet. Yours is almost double It went Herschel's. If you take Haughton's estimate it immensely strengthens your argument.

I have had some correspondence with Jukes-Browne⁸ on this subject. His idea appears to be that the oceans have gradually grown smaller & deeper, but ^and that formerly there was more land. This seems to me impossible unless he postulates that there was formerly less water, for shallower oceans would imply less land.

I have an abstract of a paper by Claypole⁹ in Bull. Geol. Soc. Am. vol 2¹⁰ on "continents and deep seas". He argues in favour of alternatives from the great thickness of some [3] deposits. But I think this is a mistake because if as seems certain the sea was usually rather shallow where the deposits were laid down & the bottom sank as the deposit went on we have no proof of the bottom of a deep sea having been elevated.

Believe me | Yours truly | Osmond Fisher¹¹ [signature]

A. R. Wallace Esq.

A very slight rise in the bottom of the ocean would drown all except hilly regions.