I'm in the middle of reading The Invisible War by Donald Barnhouse. He's a pretty strong proponent of the Gap Theory (it's much better defended than I originally thought!). In it, he makes the following claim but does not reference it:
I can't find any info. on this, but I've only briefly searched it. I'll continue to look, but in the meantime, has anyone heard of this or know where I can get anything else on it?Dr. Barnhouse wrote:Halley, the great astronomer, most popularly known today by the comet which bears his name, was much interested in the effect that such a celestial body might have upon this earth if it came very close to it. One of his recorded observations is significant in this connection. He noted that the North Pole is a few degrees away from true north, and that our earth does not move around the sun in an orbit where its mass is constant in the vertical plane of its axis. Our change of seasons is based on this fact . . . Halley wondered if the earth had once been in the vertical position, and if a comet might have pulled it slightly from its original position. He wondered, further, what the effect of such a tilting would have been. So he set himself to calculate the volume, mass and weight of the oceans of the world, and drew the conclusion that such a change of balance in the spinning globe would have pulled the seas from their beds and sent them whirling round the earth, picking up the mountain ranges and tossing them onwards . . . with the maximum in centrifugal force, until the equilibrium of the new polar axis had become established and the world settled down with the mountains lying broken in their new positions, and the seas set in their new boundaries.
Thanks, and God bless