The Earth's Shifting Crust by Charles Hapgood - wire of information

CAMPBELL'S MECHANISM 369
hoping that you can give me a steer in nontechnical terms on the general
concepts.
My hunch is that, contrary to a widespread impression, it is the
bulge alone that stabilizes the geographical poles. As I reason it out,
if the earth were a perfect sphere, the energy of its rotation, derived
from its mass in motion, would "stabilize" the speed of the rotation,
but would have no reference to its direction. If we suppose that some-
body could reach out from Mars with a pole, and give the earth a
strong push at an angle of 90 from the direction of rotation, the
earth would be shifted on the axis of rotation to an extent de-
termined by the ratio of the force of the push to the mass of the
earth. In fact, if the earth had no bulge, it would never have stable
poles, but would rotate every which way.
. . .
If my view of the matter is sound, important consequences follow,
but I am not quite certain of the validity of my premises.
Dr. Shapley's reply, dated February 2, 1951, was, in part,
as follows:
Dr. [Harold] Jeffreys was fortunately here at the Harvard Ob-
servatory and I could turn over your inquiry to him. I now have his
reply. He says in effect that the fullest discussion of the points mentioned
by you is in Routh's Rigid Dynamics, probably in volume I.
Most textbooks of rigid dynamics will have something about it. The
theory goes back to Euler. Really both the rotation and the equatorial
bulge are needed to maintain stability. Without rotation the
body could be at rest at any position;
with rotation but without the
equatorial bulge it could rotate permanently about an axis in any
direction. . . . (343).
With this statement I decided to rest content. It seemed to
me that Brown's position in the matter was correct. Maxwell
showed both by the use of his dynamical top and theoretically
what Brown showed by his device: that a rotating sphere
tends to throw the heaviest weights on its surface to the
equator of spin. Maxwell and, after him, George H. Darwin
recognized that the equatorial bulge of the globe stabilized
the direction of the earth's rotation just as a weight on the
surface of a model sphere would do when the sphere was
rotated rapidly.
Yet there is a distinct difference between the earth and
the model globe. The earth's approximately round shape is