Appendix A. Cause of Day and Night.
APPENDIX A. Cause of Day and Night.
The usual question propounded by the average person when first the idea of a hollow earth is presented to him, is, "What is the cause of Day and Night? "As stated in the preface of this work, it has not been my purpose to expound any final doctrines concerning that mysterious realm above our heads, which presents so many phenomena beyond the reach of mortal man to explain with any degree of finality. Nevertheless, I append my conception of the heavens as I believe them to be in relation to the hollow earth; and illustrate, in Fig. 23, the probable cause of Day and Night.
The earth's shell is stationary; the heavens themselves revolve once every 24 hours. The central sun is dark on one side and light on the other, and the light side being focalized on the revolving heavens, causes the continual change of day and night. The apparent descension of the sun from the zenith, at noon, to the horizon, at sunset, is explained as follows: It is natural to suppose that the invisible ethereal medium through which the sun's light reaches us, grows denser as it approaches the central sun; hence by a law of Physics we have the conditions in which the rays of light on leaving the focalized sun are bent farther and farther away "from the perpendicular," as indicated in Fig. 23, until on reaching an observer's eye directly beneath the point Z, the rays seem to come from the point W in the west. As the focalized sun revolves beyond this point, it appears to sink below the observer's horizon, or in other words, to set. In Fig. 24 is shown a simple apparatus by which the phenomenon may be studied experimentally. Let an image of the sun or moon be set up at M; and place an ordinary triangular glass prism P in the position shown. With the eye at E, the image M will appear to be seen along the line HF. The refractive power of the glass prism causes the rays of light to follow the path MBAE; and these rays are bent in such a way that, although the side, or edge, of the image is turned toward the point E, yet the full view of the image is seen as at M'. Now the variation in the lateral thickness of the glass prism, being greater toward the center C, corresponds to the variation in the density of the ether towards the central sun, hence there is a similar bending of the rays from the focalized sun as shown in the illustration. At the extreme position of M, in Fig. 24, the image is observed to be somewhat elliptical, or flattened; and this phenomenon is also observed in the rising and setting sun, as shown in the small illustration. ---
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- -- Source: O. F. Barcus, A New World Discovered (1917).