IS ANOTHER ICE AGE COMING?

Dunstan Times, Issue 3144, 20 November 1922, Page 7

IS ANOTHER ICE AGE COMING?

(Daily Chronicle Hull' Correspondent.) The truth of the New Testament revelation that nations will ultimately be as one was borne out by Professor Sir C. S. Sherrington, president of the British Association, in hig presidential address. "In the range of animal forms," he said, "we meet two peaks, one in insect life, and the other in the vertebrate. In the insect the type of mind, is not rational, but instructive, whereas at the height of vertebrate development, reason is there as well as instinct. Yet in both the one outcome seems to be the welding of individuals into societies on a scale of organisation otherwise unattained. Professor Sherrington amplified, for mo what this scientific reasoning involved. I asked him if it meant that in ages to come there would be a complete fusion of nations-, and he replied "Undoubtedly, at some remote period. That is what we were leading forward to. "We can tell," he said, "in what direction nature is bearing us. One day the revelation in the New Testament will he realised and the human race will be one harmonious unit. It will take aeons of time, hut a review of biological history points to the fact that the processes are functioning towards that end." I pointed out to him that it was strange this should ba so similar to a Biblican prophecy. He replied thta science only confirmed the revelation of a Kingdom of God Upon' earth. "Even the great war," ho declared, "was a step towards evolution and the fusion of nations. Germany's idea was execrable. Her idea of fusion) of races was for every other nation to have been welded under her. and for us to have been slaves under German foremen, but the course the war took prevented that, and 1 the great problem of the future, from the biological point of view, in considering the human race as one broad, harmonious whole, is that of the yellow and colored populations in America. "That, to the scientific mind is an extremely difficult problem, but I have no doubt in my own mind that ultimately the whole of the human family will be as one unit." When I asked Professor Sherrington whether some great planetary cataclysm or internecine disturbance" of the future was likely to affect that harmony of races, he agreed that it was quite possible there might be another glacial epoch to bo reckoned with Inhumanity beforehand. "That would indeed be an S.O.S. for the world," he said, "and there is no question but that it will come one day as it has occurred in the past. "The tilting of the earth's axis," ho said, "will make those parts of the world now cold much colder, and those parts now tropical will become more temperate. "We are getting to the end of our main sources of energy," he said. "though after coal there is waterpower. Should human ingenuity find some other source of power the next glacial epoch might not matter much, except to drive man to bis greatest achievement. "Such an epoch might last 10,000 years,'' ho pointed out, and drew for mo a graphic picture of how man saved himself in the last period when the human race retreated south and lived in caves.