ALL-CONQUERING SEA

Evening Star, Issue 19411, 20 November 1926, Page 13

ALL-CONQUERING SEA

SCIENCE FORETELLS ANOTHER FLOOD In ages still undreamed of, thousands ot years distant, the waters will envelop tho earth and man will have perished. Such is the picture of the end of the world that French scientists have drawn from their investigations. It may bo that when the dome of a St. Paul’s of that future age disappears beneath the waves man, as lord of the earth, will go down with it, and leave only a dead and empty waste of waters, a world as void of life in the forms wc know as-the moon is to-day. ... Some water-breathing amphibian, perhaps, will evolve to take his place as lord of creation; or some finned and gilled being, a sort of king among the fishes, will hold lordship over the drowned world, and dive among tho ruins of the cities that the land people once built. BRITAIN ON THE CONTINENT,

Like humanity, the world is subject to disease and decay of all its geological structures. Apparently impregnable mountain masses are attacked by the alternating forces of heat and cold, which in time disintegrate the hardest rocks. Glaciers, forming on the slopes, grind away acres of the mass, dragging the heights down to the valleys, and then the rivers begin their work and carry tho one-time mountain masses in particles to the sea French scientists have estimated that every year 307,797 cubic feet ot earth and rock are thus washed down.to the sea. Further, they have ascertained that the total land area of the globe is 57,225,000 square miles, with an average height of 2,275 ft above sea level. Year by year attrition takes toll of the mass, and spreads a tiny layer of land over tho bed of the sea—so, tiny that if the' spread were uniform the lift of the ocean bed would be just l-750th- part of an inch. And, at any rate, it would take no less than seven million years for the ocean beds to be lifted until there is no more dry land. But inexorably, year by year, the land is being robbed away, and in comparatively recent- times vast changes nave been wrought. In the time in which man has been on the earth that part of the world where the North Sea washes was dry land, and the Upper Rhine flowed through the great lowlands that were sheltered by the Dogger Bank, Britain was part of the continent of Europe, and vast forests waved where the waters roll to-day. - LAND OP ATLANTIS. Similarly, westward from the Bay of Biscay out toward the Azores and the Canary Islands, stretched tho mighty continent of Atlantis, with a civilisation almost equal with our own, though on different fines. The islands of the Atlantic are tho mere mountain tops of that vanished land, sunk so long ago that not even a record remains of its waterlogged treasures and sea-»washed cities. Man himself, by cutting down forests and giving sun and cold a chance to denude the mountain sides, is helping to destroy his world by speeding up the process of attrition. And not only where water helps in the work, but even in such dry regions as Sahara and the desert of Gobi, the grinding down of the earth goes on steadily. ALL-CONQUERING SEA. The alt-conquering sea is at work, and tho mere earth has no chance against it. The Flood of Biblican times, according to modern science, was a_ purely local affair, affecting the region between the Tigris and Euphrates, the place of origin- of modern civilisation. * -'But the last great flood with which the world, as we know it, will end will not bo an affair of forty days’ rainfall and flooded rivers, but a steady, remorseless eating away of the last ramparts of earth raised against the advancing sea. There will probably be a dwindled remnant of humanity fighting desperately against the overwhelming torrent in the last days of earth. There may be floating cities built as a final refuge for a highly civilised and scientific race of fish-eaters—for no land will be left for the cultivation of cereals or the rearing of cattle. _ At the mercy of the storms and tides, drifting hither and thither, the last of the human race will watch the last of earth disappear in that far-off age. Possibly science, developed to a pitch of which we have. t no conception, will be called in to adapt man’s physical organisation to the point that will make him a water-dweller. Gills and fins may be grafted on, and in his altered form man may still rule the world.

Or, on the other hand, evolution may have produced some being as far in advance of mankind as man is above the monkey tribe. Possibly, in another 200,000 years evolution will have begun io produce a higher type, master of water as well as of earth and air, and able to fit itself for the last great change.