First published in 1929 by Methuen & Co. Ltd.
This edition first published in 2018 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
1929 Taylor & Francis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.
Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.
A Library of Congress record exists under ISBN: 29030415
ISBN 13: 978-1-138-55523-5 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-203-70556-8 (ebk)
MODERN SCIENCE
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
WHAT IS MAN?
SCIENCE AND RELIGION
TOWARDS HEALTH
THE WONDER OF LIFE
THE BIOLOGY OF THE SEASONS
THE SYSTEM OF ANIMATE NATURE
THE NEW NATURAL HISTORY
S CIENCE tries to reach back to beginnings, but it can never reach the beginning. For if we picture a scientific beginning, that is to say, something simple in the way of matter and energy and mind, it is always open to some one to ask : But what was there before that? If the answer be there was nothing before that except itself, then we are saying that we can picture what is everlasting, which is far too daring a thing to say. If the answer be that before what we can picture there was a simpler something that we cannot picture, then we are confessing that we have not got back to the beginning. Thus science, as science, does not speak about the beginning, nor about the end either.
But it is a very different kind of question to ask : What was the beginning of the Solar System, with its sun and planets?; or How did the Earth begin?; or How did Flowering Plants begin?; or How did the Flying Birds begin? These are reasonable scientific questions, to which we can give some sort of answer, which becomes more and more satisfactory as the years pass. For knowledge grows from more to more.
An old naturalist once showed us a small island in a noble river, and told us with some pride that he had been an eye-witness of its whole history. It began from a couple of big trees that had been undermined and swept down by a flood. They stranded in a shallow and formed the beginning of a barrier that grew and gathered soil. After long years the outcome was a substantial island with trees and shrubs, even with birds and beasts of its own.
This is but an instance of what is always going on, for the face of the earth is continually changing. Great changes follow the widespread cutting down of timber in times of war; the bed of a river sways from side to side; the coastline, even a very rocky one, is always altering; villages that were once on the shore may now be miles inland, and, on the other hand, fields where the cattle once grazed are now good fishing grounds. We have to think also of gales, sand-storms, forest-fires, landslips, floods, and other violent influences that have often greatly altered the face of a countryside. Much more important, however, than sudden catastrophes are the imperceptibly slow changes of climate, such as those that brought about the Ice Ages, and the great changes of level, such as those that lifted up the Himalayas or made an island of Australia. How well Tennyson put ithe was always happy in his references to science :
There rolls the deep where grew the tree,
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There, where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands;
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
It is very plain that the earth has not always been as it is, and what stories the geologists tell us of moulding and sculpturing, of washing away and depositing again, of breaking down and building up! We must get accustomed to the idea that the outermost crust of the earth has been unmade and remade, over and over again.
But where the geologists leave off, the astronomers take up the tale, and lead our thoughts back to the young earthto a rotating gaseous mass at a high temperature, in some way or other heaved off from the parent sun.
They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread
In tracts of fluent heat began,
And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man.
There can be no doubt that our earth arose from the sun, and a good case can be made out for the theory that it arose as one of the knots on the arms of a huge twisted nebula. The other knots on the arms became the other planets, and perhaps the earth knot was originally a double knot, including the moon from the very first. It is possible that the nebulous arms were drawn out from the gaseous sun by the tidal attraction of a passing star; so that in a somewhat fanciful way we may think of the earth and the planets having two parents, the one being the sun, the other a great unknown. We should notice here that our present-day sun sometimes shoots out flaming solar prominences to heights of 100,000 miles, and some authorities would multiply this figure by three. These are often well seen when there is a total eclipse of the sun.
