In my last letter to you I pointed out that my brother’s theory of the effect of pressure in lowering the freezing-point of water, affords a perfect explanation of various remarkable phenomena involving the internal melting of ice, described by Professor Tyndall in the Number of the ‘Proceedings’ which has just been published. I wish now to show that the stratification of vesicular ice by pressure observed on a large scale in glaciers, and the lamination of clear ice described by Dr. Tyndall as produced in hand specimens by a Brahmah’s press, are also demonstrable as conclusions from the same theory. Conceive a continuous mass of ice, with vesicles containing either air or water distributed through it ; and let this mass be pressed together by opposing forces on two opposite sides of it. The vesicles will gradually become arranged in strata perpendicular to the lines of pressure,
because of the melting of ice in the localities of greatest pressure and the regelation of the water in the localities of least pressure, in the neighbourhood of groups of these cavities
. For, any two vesicles nearly in the direction of the condensation will afford to the ice between them a relief from pressure, and will occasion an aggravated pressure in the ice round each of them in the places farthest out from the line joining their centres; while the pressure in the ice on the far sides of the two vesicles will be some what diminished from what it would be were their cavities filled up with the' solid, although not nearly as much diminished as it is in the ice between the two. Hence, as demonstrated by my brother’s theory and my own experiment, the melting temperature of the ice round each vesicle will be highest on its side nearest to the other vesicle, and lowest in the localities on the whole farthest from the line joining the centres. Therefore, ice will melt from these last-mentioned localities, and, if each vesicle have water in it, the partition between the two will thicken by freezing on each side of it. Any two vesicles, on the other hand, which are nearly in a line perpendicular to the direction of pressure will agree in leaving an aggravated pressure to be borne by the solid between them, and will each direct away some of the pressure from the portions of the solid next itself on the two sides farthest from the plane through the centres, perpendicular to the line of pressure. This will give rise to an in crease of pressure on the whole in the solid all round the two cavities, and nearly in the plane perpendicular to the pressure, although nowhere else so much as in the part between them. Hence these two vesicles will gradually extend towards one another by the melting of the intervening ice, and each will become flattened in towards the plane through the centres perpendicular to the direction of pressure, by the freezing of water on the parts of the bounding surface farthest from this plane. It may be similarly shown that two vesicles in a line oblique to that of condensation will give rise to such variations of pressure in the solid in their neighbourhood, as to make them, by melting and freezing, to extend, each obliquely
towards
the other and
from
the parts of its boundary most remote from a plane midway between them, perpendicular to the direction of pressure.
The Theory of the Large Scale Structure of the Universe
