Harlton
Cambridge
12 Aug[ust] 1892
My dear Sir,
I have read your article on the permanence of ocean basins in "Natural Science" with much interest. I am grateful to you for the approving manner in which you refer to my book. 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 edition I found that Herschel1 following Humbolt2 [sic] had put it at 1800 feet & that Carrick Moore3 had reduced [2] this by half to 900. In my second edition I followed Haughton4 and took 1000 feet. Yours is almost double [?] Herschel's. If you take Haughton's estimate it immensely strengthens your argument.
I have had some correspondence with Jukes-Browne5 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 Claypole6 in Bull[etin]. Geol[ogical]. Soc[iety]. [of] Am[erica]. vol 2 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 Fisher [signature]
A. R. Wallace Esq.
A very slight rise in the bottom of the ocean would drown all except [?] regions.
Status: Draft transcription [Letter (WCP2455.2345)]
For more information about the transcriptions and metadata, see https://wallaceletters.myspecies.info/content/epsilon
Please cite as “WCP2455,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 27 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP2455