William Lowthian Green (13 September 1819 – 7 December 1890) was an English adventurer and merchant who later became cabinet minister in the Kingdom of Hawaii.

His father, Joseph Green, was apprenticed to an early scientific instrument maker, Jesse Ramsden, and then started a successful merchandise business in northern England.

[citation needed] Green left Janion around 1867, and the English investor Theophilus Harris Davies then had to travel from London to bail out the company.

[6] A major milestone of his administration was ratifying the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 with the United States on 17 June 1876,[1] which was also signed by Ulysses S. Grant.

Green was told to form a new cabinet; he included Lorrin A. Thurston, a leader of the bloodless coup, as minister of interior.

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.

[9] In 1857 he published an article in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal based on the theory of Jean-Baptiste Élie de Beaumont.

For example, the French geologist Albert Auguste Cochon de Lapparent mentioned Green's work in his textbook.

[15] 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.

[19] But by the late 1920s Holmes was promoting theories of continental drift[20] as proposed by Alfred Wegener,[21] 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.