Extracted text
Printed department: a newspaper extract followed by the periodical’s editorial response.
Editorial transcription, lightly normalized from the cited scan pages. Historical claims remain those of The Flaming Sword.
Latest Conclusions from Government Geodetic Survey.
HERE we are again! The following headlines are quoted from the Boston Evening Transcript:
THE EARTH NO GLOBE.—MODERN SCIENCE MODIFIES A POPULAR BELIEF.— A Tetrahedron the Shape Accepted as Correct by the Best Scientific Minds.—How the Earth's Dimensions Are Figured.
A tetrahedron is a body enclosed in four triangles, and is the shape of the earth! This conclusion is reached through fifty years' extensive work in geodetic surveying, and is "the shape accepted as correct by the best scientific minds." Navigators must have some sharp corners to turn in their tetrahedral navigation, for, according to "the best scientific minds," we can no longer circumnavigate the globe!
How happy the world will be when it can learn something to keep.
The article in the Evening Transcript ends by saying: The shrinking of the earth is a geological rather than a geodetic question, but I believe it is scientifically admitted that such a process is going on. But our coast survey service is primarily for the making of maps, AND IT is ONE OF OUR FIRST DUTIES TO DETERMINE THE SIZE AND SHAPE OF THE EARTH, UPON WHICH ALL ELSE DEPENDS, and hence the great and painstaking experiments which the government is conducting in conjunction with the other governments of the world.
The governments of the world are trying to ascertain the size and shape of the earth! It is an absolute fact that triangulation, on either a concave or a convex surface, conducted ever so carefully, would result in the same conclusions. The present experiments will not determine whether the earth is concave or convex, therefore they cannot conclude as to its shape. The water surfaces of the earth are concave, but the surface is not necessarily uniform, as the cell is not absolutely spherical; but this is the general shape. The mechanical means employed to determine this is simple enough to convince the most skeptical investigator, if he be honest. However, the mechanical survey is of very small importance as proof, as compared with the system of correspondential analogy and the applied principles of optics, a knowledge of which is so essential to any correct conception of the form of the earth.
Source boundary: Begins under “Latest Conclusions from Government Geodetic Survey”; includes the Boston Evening Transcript extract and the Koreshan response; ends before “On the Point of the Sword.”
Vol. 12, No. 31 · PDF page 4
The Flaming Sword · Vol. 12, No. 31 · Jun 1898 · PDF p. 4