page_title: William Lowthian Green
section_title: Geology
hierarchical_section_title: William Lowthian Green / Life / Geology
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration of Tetrahedral hypothesis for the Earth's formation by 1875 publication of William Lowthian Green. Green (1819–1890) was an English adventurer and merchant, who later became cabinet minister in the Kingdom of Hawaii.
context_page_description: William Lowthian Green was an English adventurer and merchant who later became cabinet minister in the Kingdom of Hawaii. As an amateur geologist, he published a theory of the formation of the earth called the tetrahedral hypothesis.
context_section_description: Green was fascinated by the volcanoes in the Hawaiian islands. By 1855 he wrote a series of articles on local geology in the Sandwich Islands Monthly newspaper of Abraham Fornander. His ideas on the formation of the earth, based on the nebular hypothesis of Pierre-Simon Laplace, shocked the local conservatives who literally believed in creation according to Genesis.
  In 1857 he published an article in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal based on the theory of Jean-Baptiste Élie de Beaumont. In 1859 he went on expeditions to view the erupting Mauna Loa and nearby Kīlauea and Hualālai on Hawaiʻi island. He hosted the adventurer Isabella Bird when she came to visit, and gave her a tour of the volcanoes.
  His first book on his tetrahedral hypothesis was published in 1875. It was "...a work which was neglected or ridiculed at the time of its appearance." The journal Nature published only a one-line notice for the book.
  He published a second volume in 1887 concentrating on volcanic phenomena. This time the Nature journal published three sentences.
  As his health failed he dictated a criticism of the work of James Dwight Dana. Green died at his home in Honolulu on 7 December 1890. 
  His theory became more widely discussed into the first decades of the 20th century. For example, the French geologist Albert Auguste Cochon de Lapparent mentioned Green's work in his textbook.
  The American geologist Charles Henry Hitchcock, in his own 1911 book on the Hawaiian volcanoes, said:
  The memory of William Lowthian Green will be honored henceforth because of his success in showing why the Earth has assumed its present relief.
  Théophile Moreux said observations "...point more and more to the truth of an old theory which was long ignored." In their textbooks, Archibald Geikie
  and Arthur Holmes called the theory '"ingenious". But by the late 1920s Holmes was promoting theories of continental drift as proposed by Alfred Wegener, which evolved into concepts of plate tectonics. Modern theories view the current continental configurations as only transitory, so give no special role to the tetrahedral shape. However, they do attribute a large influence to volcanic activity as he suggested.
caption: Illustration of the tetrahedral hypothesis from his 1875 book
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