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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2009
When I received the invitation to open this discussion my first feeling was of diffidence, for, the interior of the earth being necessarily inaccessible to direct observation, the solution of the problems connected with it has principally been left to mathematical research, and this must remain the final court of appeal. In these circumstances it seemed verging on presumptuousness to address an audience consisting so largely of mathematicians in inauguration of a discussion on the interior of the earth. Second thoughts showed that there was much to he said against this view, for, though mathematics is the court of appeal, it can only decide on the facts placed before it by the sciences of observation, and so the discussion seems profitably prefaced by a statement of the leading facts which have been collected, and those conclusions which are so directly derived from them as to have almost the validity of observation.
page 19 note 1 Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc., iii, pp. 1–5, 1793.Google Scholar
page 21 note 1 Journal of Geology, xxiii, p. 44, 1915.Google Scholar
page 22 note 1 Trans. Seismol. Soc. Japan, xii, pp. 115 ff., 1888.Google Scholar
page 22 note 2 Beiträge z. Geophysik., iii, pp. 519–40, 1898.Google Scholar
page 22 note 3 Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc., lxii, p. 456, 1906.Google Scholar
page 23 note 1 “Ueber Erdbebenwellen”: Göttingen Nachrichten, 1907.
page 24 note 1 Not yet published in full; for an abstract see Nature, November 21, 1918, p. 239.
page 24 note 2 In this connexion it is noteworthy that just a year ago Dr. G. W. Walker announced his conclusion that many of the earthquakes which give rise to long distance records originate at about this depth (Brit. Assoc. Rep., 1917). The conclusion cannot be regarded as fully established, and there are some difficulties in the way of its acceptance, but it is an important and interesting suggestion, which must receive serious consideration, with the reservation that the origin is not of the earthquake proper but of the bathyseism, of which the surface quake, which is felt and does damage, is a secondary result (see Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc., lxv, p. 14, 1909Google Scholar).
page 25 note 1 Göttingen Nachrichten, 1897, pp. 221–43.Google Scholar
page 25 note 2 Modern Seismology, 1913.
page 26 note 1 Monthly Notices of R.A.S., 05, 1917, p. 454.Google Scholar
