The Dominion. SATURDAY, MAY 8, 1909. WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 502, 8 May 1909, Page 4

The Dominion. SATURDAY, MAY 8, 1909. WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG.

It is not tho way of the man in the street to think vory much about tho things have interested him: he is quite satisfied to havo. had his idlo curiosity fed. But of tho millions of people who 6agerly devoured the accounts of Lieutenant Shackleton's discoveries, very few can have failed to ask themselves exactly how Science profited from the expedition. Most of them, no doubt, asked the question and thought: no more about it; a respectable minority probably spent a little thought on the problem, and decided that Science had gained nothing in the, way of stimulating facts. Yet the scientists have had a great deal,the besO of it. There were some simple facts in Lieutenant Shackleton's narrative over which the scientific mind can gloat, and has been gloating, with enthusiastic delight. The chief of these facts are, first, that coal exists in the Polar regions, and, second, that the ice-cap is retreating south., .From the first of these facts it is apparent that at some Btage .of the world's history luxuriant tropical vegetation bloomed, where now thero is only perpetual ice and snow. From the second it is clear, either that the climate- of the globe is becoming warmer, or that the amount of atmospheric moisturo is diminishing. To no scientist will these discoveries bo a source of greater pleasure and satisfaction than to Professor PerCIVAL Lowell, whose new book, Man as the, Abode oj Life> sets forth a'theory that .could hardly have hoped for any practical evidence to support it for many ages to come.. Professor Lowell's theory may be thus-conveniently summarised: "that the canals form a complete system which brings water from the melting Polar snows for the irrigation of an otherwise arid country; that the; canals can be seen to change in appearance when-the water flows through them and forms vegetation; and that all the available ovidence fits in with the theory that tho canals, which have their junctions in oases, constitute. such an intricate and -caroftilly-designed plan as could be thought out and effected only by a raco in a highly-advanced stage of civilisation." . ■ In Professor Lowell's view,' Mars is in a later stage of development than the earth. He defines six phases of planetary development: "I. Tho • Sun. Stage. Hot enough to emit light.' ■ n. The Molten Stage. Hot, but lightless.. m. Tho Solidifying Stage. Solid surface ■' formed. Ooeau basins determined. Ago of Metamorphic rooks. IV. THo Terraqueous Stage. Ago of sedimontary rocka . v. The Terrestrial Stage. Oceans have dis- ! appeared. • ' , . ! ,vi., The Dead Stage. 'Air has departed." •The earth is in the fourth stage, and Mars in tho fifth, carrying on the last •war against Time in the process toward tho dissolution of air life. It is an extraordinarily vivid picture that Profes l sor Lowell draws of the early world, of .which; tho Ant-arctic 'coal is a pathetic relic: ■ . ■ - , : ' '.-. . "The land was a . sorry spectacle in those days.. Granite fringed by mud-flats pictures but an inhospitable sight. The seas were much as they are now, only wanner. Their equable temperature for wide,localities and itheir, slow, accommodation to climatic chango rendered 'them places of easy , livelihood- to simple organisms. In addition to which, food, inorganio at first, was floated past' the baby planets or animals, and as constantly renewed. .To its seas and oceans our planet, then, is actually, if not necessarily, indebted; for the life which now teems everywhere upon its Burfaoe. Life, onoo .started, oontinued the course of advancement thuß aquatically begun, just as itself was the continuance of the inorganio development which had gone before. And .the-"dons' ex maehina was the same—a gradual lowering of temperature. The fauna of that age. was a tvarmth-loving one, an attribute betrayed by the fact, that their nearest relatives now extant live wholly within tho tropics, huddled us were about the Equator. Coral reefs, now - not found .outside of the warm, equatorial seas; in a temperature not less than 68deg. :F., were reared then in spots now covered with perpetual ice, within eight degrees of the Pole. The flora of the coal measures corroborates the testimony of the animals of that ; day to tho climatic warmth which then ; existed. Gigantic ferns, fifty feot high; others,' more • lowly, thirty feot in spread;- marsh-loving calamites, horsetails, and club-mossss, dignified to, tho dimensions of trees, spread their. incipient jleayes from' well-nigh woodless stems,' and grew; flourished, and-decayed with almost Jaok-and-the-beanstalk rapidity . between 33dcg. and 70deg. of latitude. ; Only a warm, humid foothold and lambent air could have given them such luxuriance and impressed them with such speed." In those early days it was not the Bun, but the earth's own heat,. that provided the dark perpetual summer of the steaming globe. "In the vast marshes which aS time went on came to constitute so large a portion of the continents this vegetation' was singularly same. Not pretty, not profuse; dense, but not varied, cryptogams composed its' greater, part, attesting by the habit of the ferns of to-day .to the shady half-light in which they must have lived. Grotesque rather than; bgautiful, no flowera touched with colour the sombre stems.. No birds made the. air about them half sentient with song. Only shade-affecting insects, mayflies of! mammoth wing, 'flitted through the gloom of those old forests accentuating a .heavy stillness they were powerless to dispel." Tho trees "minded not extraneous things, but grew right on; not to] delight the world, but to make coal measures," such ooal measures as .are now lying in tho freezing plains .of Antarcticaj. If, as now seems possible, Professor Lowell's conception; of Mars is correct, or even roughly correct, tho timo is slowly coming when the waters of the world'will disappear excepting for the reserve in cold storage at tho Poles. Later ages may find the inhabitants of; our planet driven to Polar surveys by another motive than a desire to explore the unknown, by the necessity, in fact, of drawing to the temperate regions the water, necessary: to the continu. anco of life. Not until then, when man's inventions shall havo made the inventions of to-day one with tho stone axes of our earliest ancestors, will the coal measures of the Polar regions be utilised for tho heat and power stored up in them. The assistance which the discoveries; made by the Shacklcton expedition afford to the scientists who are groping their way'to'a knowledge of the past and the .future,.of the earth is a striking example of tho obscuro materials out. of iszHeb Science build* her truth*.