"On the Precession of a Viscous Spheroid and on the Remote History of the Earth", offprint from Philosophical Transactions--the First Modern Idea on the Formation of the Moon

DARWIN, G.H. "On the Precession of a Viscous Spheroid and on the Remote History of the Earth", offprint from Philosophical Transactions, part II, 1879, pp 437-538. Original wrappers. Some discoloration around front wrapper edges, other a VG copy. __+__ "Before Kuiper revived the double planet thesis, George Darwin, son of the famous British naturalist, had in 1878 advanced an attractive alternative. Drawing on the pronounced tidal effects exerted between the earth and moon, Darwin speculated that the moon's mass had been ejected from a fluid and rapidly spinning protoearth when centrifugal force and solar tides, acting on matter in the earth's equatorial plane, exceeded the force of gravity. In time, the moon moved out to its present orbit and attained its coincident period of rotation and revolution as a result of tidal interactions between the two bodies."--NASA History Online, "LUNAR IMPACT: A History of Project Ranger Appendix A, LUNAR THEORY BEFORE 1964".__+__ "The first modern idea about the formation of the Moon was called the fission theory, and it came from George Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin.He reasoned the Moon must have broken away from our planet, when the Earth was still a rapidly rotating ball of molten rock."--Fraser Cain, "How Did the Moon Form?" Universe Today.…