"George Griffith - From Pole to Pole" - читать интересную книгу автора (Griffith George)

Arthur Princeps bit the amber of his pipe clean through, sat bolt upright, caught the pipe in his hand, spat
the pieces of amber into the fireplace, and said---

"I beg your pardon, Professor--through the centre of the earth? That's rather a large order, isn't it? I've
just been reading an article in one of the scientific papers which goes to show that the centre of the
earth--the kernel of the terrestrial nut, as it were--is a rigid, solid body harder and denser than anything
we know on the surface."

"Quite so, quite so," replied the Professor. "I have read the article myself, and I admit that the reasoning
is sound as far as it goes but I don't think it goes quite far enough--I mean far enough back. However, I
think I can show you what I mean in a much shorter time than I can tell you."

As he said this, he got up from his chair and went to a little cupboard in a big bureau which stood in a
recess beside the fireplace. He took out a glass vessel about six inches in diameter and twelve in height,
and placed it gently on a little table which stood between the easy-chairs.

Princeps glanced at it and saw that it was filled with a fluid which looked like water. Exactly half-way
between the surface of the fluid and the bottom of the glass there was a spherical globule of a
brownish-yellow colour, and about an inch in diameter. As the Professor set the glass on the table, the
globule oscillated a little and then came to a rest. Princeps looked at it with a little lift of his eyelids, but
said nothing. His host went back to the cupboard and took out a long, thin, steel needle with a little disc
of thin white metal fixed about three inches from the end. He lowered it into the fluid in the glass and
passed it through the middle of the globule, which broke as the disc passed into it, and then re-shaped
itself again in perfectly spherical form about it.

The Professor looked up and said, just as though he were repeating a portion of one of his lectures---

"This is a globule of coloured oil. It floats in a mixture of alcohol and water which is of exactly the same
specific gravity as its own. It thus represents as nearly as possible the earth in its former molten condition,
floating in space. The earth had then, as now, a rotary action on its own axis. This needle represents that
axis. I give it a rotary motion, and you will see here what happened millions of years ago to the infant
planet Terra."

As he said this, he began to twirl the needle swiftly but very steadily between the forefingers of his right
and left hand. The globule flattened and spread out laterally until it became a ring, with the needle and the
disc in the centre of it. Then the twirling slowed down. The ring became a globule again, but it was
flattened at either pole, and there was a clearly defined circular hole through it from pole to pole. The
Professor deftly withdrew the needle and disc through the opening, and the globule continued to revolve
round the hole through its centre.

"That is what I mean," he said. "Of course, I needn't go into detail with you. There is the earth as I believe
it to be today, with certain exceptions which you will readily see.

"The exterior crust has cooled. Inside that there is probably a semi-fluid sphere, and inside that again,
possibly, the rigid body, the core of the earth. But I don't believe that that hole has been filled, simply
because it must have been there to begin with. Granted also that the pull of gravitation is towards the
centre, still, if there is a void from Pole to Pole, as I hold there must be, as a natural consequence of the
centrifugal force generated by the earth's revolution, the mass of the earth would pull equally in all
directions away from that void."