"IN THE BEGINNING."

Northern Advocate, 9 March 1920, Page 6

"IN THE BEGINNING."

UHU.DHOOD OF THE WORLD

'.K.lLiAh; 01-' Hi STORY

;l. 1;. WELLS' PRODUCTION

ihe iii'st part of Mr li. G. Wilis' •'Outline of History" has now been published"This 'Outline of History' is an attempt to tell, truly and clearly, in oii c continuous narrative, the whole story of life and mankind so far as it ii; known to-day," says Mr Wells.

•'There can be no peace now, we realise, but a common peace in all the world; no prosperity but a general prosperity. But there can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas. Without such ideas to hold them together ■in harmonious co-operation, with nothing but narrow, selfish, and conflicting nationalist traditions, races anl peoples ar c bound to drift towards conflict and destruction. This truth, which was apparent to that great philosopher Kant a century or more a g . o —a, is the gist of his tract upon universal peace—is now plain to the man in the street. OUR SPINNING GLOBE. "The earth on which we live is a spinning globe. Vast though it seems to us it is a mere speck of matter in the greater vastness of space. "One star is so near to us that it is like a great ball of flame. This on e is the sun. Its mean distance from the earth is ninety-three million miles. It is a mass of flaming matter, having a diameter of 866,000 miles. Us bulk is a million and a quarter times the bulk of our earth. "If the earth were a small ball,, one inch in diameter, the sun would b e a globe of nine feet diameter; it would fill a small bedroom. I "It is well to undersand how empty space is. If, as we have said, the sun were a ball nine f e et across, our earth would, in proportion, be the size of a one-inch ball, and at a distance of 330 yards from the sun. The moon would be a speck the size of a small pea, twenty inches from the earth. "The diameter of our world is a little under 8000 miles. Its surface is rouffh, the more projecting parts of the roughness are mountains, and, in the hollows of its surface there is a film of water, the oceans and seas. This film of water is about five miles thick at its deepest part —that is to say, the deepest oceans have a depth of five miles. This is very little ;n comparison with the bulk of the world." HOW OLD IS THE WORLD? "W e do not know how life began upon th e earth. Biologists—that is to say, students of life—have made guesses about these beginnings, but we will not discuss them here. Let up only note that they all agree that life began where the tides of those swif-t days spread and receded over the steaming beaches of mud and sand. "Speculations about geological time vary enormously. Estimates of the ago of the oldest rocks by geologists nnd astronomers starting from different standpoints have varied 1,600,000,000 and 25,000,000.

"The lowest estimate was made by Lord Kelvin in 1867. Professor Huxley guessed at 400,000,000 years. Th< J re is a summary of views and the grounds upon which the estimates have been made in Osborne's 'Origin of Evolution of Life'; he inclines to the moderate total of 100,000,000. It must be clearly understood by the reader how sketchy and provisional all these estimates are. They rest nearly always upon theoretical assumptions of the slenderest kind. That th e period of time lias been vast, that

it is to be counted by scores and possibly by hundred? of millions of years is the utmost that can be said with certainty in the matter.

■•uf the relative amount, of time as between one ag«' and another we have, however, stronger evidence; if tlv r-' ult-r cuts down the 800,000,000 we have given her e to 400,000,000, then he must reduce the 40,000,000 of the Camozoie to 20,000,000. And be it noted that whatever the total sum may be most geologists are in agreement that lialf or more than half of the whole of geological time had passed before life had developed *o the Later Palaeozoic level." TIME IS EMPTY. "The reader reading quickly through these opening chapters may be apt to think of them as a mere swift m-elude of preparation to the apparently much longer history that follows, but in reality that subsequent history is longer only because it is mor e detailed and more interesting to us. It looms larger in perspective. For ages that stagger the imagination this earth spun hot and lifeless, and again for ages of equal vastness it held no life above the lev 1 ] of th f - animaleulae in a drop of ditchwater. "Not only is Space from the point of view of life and humanity empty, but Time is empty also. Ljfe is like a little glow, scarcely kindled yet, in these void immensities." "Now here it will b e well to put plainly general facts about this new thing, lift , , that was creeping in the shallow waters and intertidal muds of th e early Palaeozoic period, and which is perhaps confined to our planet alone in all the immensity of space. "Life differs from all things whatever that ar e without life in certain general aspects. There are the most wonderful differences among living hings to-day, but alii living things and present agree in possessing a certain power of growth; all living things take nourishment, all living things mov e about as they feed and grow, though the movement may be no more than the spread of roots through the soil or of branches in the air. Moreover, living things reproduce; they give rise to other livingthings, either by growing and then dividing or by means of seeds or spores or eggs or other ways of producing young. Reproduction is »i characteristic of life. No living thing on living for ever."

"Th e Record of the Rocks is like a great, book that has been carelessly misused. All its pages are torn, worn, and defaced, and many are altogether missing. The outline of the story that we sketch here has been pieced together slowly and painfully in an investigation thaf, is still incomplete and still in progress.

"In each of these periods there were types involuntarily extending the range of life beyond the limits prevailing in that period; and when ages of extreme conditions prevailed, it was these marginal types which survived to inherit the depupulated world.

"That P e rhaps is the most general statements we can make about the story of the geological record; it is a slory of widening range. Classes, genera, and species of animals appear and disappear, but the range widens. It widens always.

"Life has never had so great a rang' , as it has to-day. Life to-day, in th>' form of man, goes higher in th c air than any other creature has ever done, his geographical range is from pole to pole, h e goes under the water in submarines, h e sounds the cold, lifeless darkness of the deepest sea, h e burrows into virgin Levels of the rocks, and in thought and knowledge he pierces to the centre of the earth and reaches out to the uttermost star."