WHAT IS THERE INSIDE?

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13925, 5 December 1908, Page 1 (Supplement)

WHAT IS THERE INSIDE?

BY TOHTJNGA.

The " solid-earth," as it was called before its vagaries were known, has ' begun to yawn again and to waken from its slumbering. Mr. Stevenson tells us that this is because the Moon came close and called, Lve-hke, to the Adam of whose rib it was made. But whatever the cause is there is commotion at Whale Island and great excitement all over New Zealand. For when *" is said and done about the average security of the Earth's 'crust, none of us like to think of its giving way, for none of us know what there is inside. It really doesn't make any difference to us what the Earth's .inside 'is, should the crust itself happen to break up. If it were a vast bowl full of the finest lemonade ever made to please the Grand Turk—who is the Grand Master of all teetotallers, though hardly a noble example of the moral improvement resulting from total abstinence—. the effect of a smash-up would b:> exactly the same as if it were full of molten fire. It doesn't matter much to you whether you fall a hundred feet or a hundred miles, although it may matter to your relatives and affect the undertaker. ' Similarly it wouldn't matter what came after the Earth's boiler burst to the myriads of human ants who are running about on it, and using it as though they owned it. Nevertheless, wo do feel interested, since none of Us really expect our particular section of the surface to be anything but firm. We are all the more interested becauso anything seems possible, and we can imagine what T we like of the Earth's interior without anybody being able to demonstrate that we are wrong. The Earth in- \ side may be.a monstrous diamond; or a lump of gold big enough to pay the interest on the penny of the conundrum— penny, you know, which was put out at interest of five per cent,; or a mass of chemical slime in which radium and helium are as common as cake at Christmas; or a cavernous sponge, in which Lytton's "Coming Race" or Jules Verne's cave-dwellers live unknown to us; or a big chunk of ice even; or anything else you please. It has been said that with all our willingness we cannot know the working of a single human intellect, the struggles of a single human soul, other than our own. This may or may not m, but certain it is that we cannot yet Know the working and the struggling, the. heaving and the mystery of the Earth upon the outer shell of which we are swept yearly round and round the sun. What is the Earth anyway? We imagine it to be inorganic because it is constituted differently to ourselves, insensate because it appears not to feel as we feel, inanimate because it seems to do nothing by what we term its '"own volition." Not so long ago, we thought the Earth was the centre of the universe because we lived on it, that the Sun revolved round us to warm us by day, and the Moon to light us by night, that the Stars had no purpose but to make the darkness spectacular, and that the only thing which ever worried the Supreme was the trouble made by Man. We are beginning to have broader thoughts, because we are beginning to understand that wo can wear a smaller hat than once we considered essential, even though it came down over .our eyes, pad it as we would with cqnceits and superstitions. But wo still take our own physical constitution, our own senses, our own minds, as the standard of universal perfection. We cannot easily admit that what appears to us to be a "curious mud ball, flying . round and round as. though on the end of a string, may hare - a wonderful Life and a wonderful Consciousness of its own, compared to which our human life and our human consciousness is as the light of a wet wax-match to the glory of the sun. Why shouldn't the Earth and the Sun and the Moon, the Planets and the Stars, be very much alive and altogether conscious? May it not be that we are only parasitic upon the majestic body of a creature so infinitely more highly organised, and so infinitely complex that we can only grasp its most insignificant details? Is it inconceivable that the stars and the worlds are pursuing a scheme of their own, which may* or may not be evolutionary, and that our little human brains are as lost in theorisings as ever were the brains of mites whose nations marshal for war upon an atom of cheese during the mite-aces that elapse while it traverses the gulf between plate and mouth? But what is inside? Whenever the earth gets hot enough it- oozes molten matter, as the human body oozes blood when it is cut and torn. If you were a Titan, and had a sword as big as that which the father of the .Nome gods waves in the sky o' wintry* nights to tell men that he is not dead and that he will send again the Seedtime and the Harvest, and if you struck at the Earth as if it were an orange, what would happen? As far as we know this would happen, that if you cut deep enough a great fissure would "follow your sword-stroke, and from tins fissure would pour lava while all the neighbouring lava shook and trembled. The old Earth bleeds as a man bleeds if its skin is torn or cut, only it bleeds hot lava instead of warm blood.

The inside may be liquid or solid, may be immensely hot but kept solid by immense pressure, may be solid while it is inside but liquefied by .relief of pressure when it reaches the surface, may be anything we like to imagine. But when the inside ge%s to the outside it is alvays hot, always and invariably about as warm as men can wish for or even conceive. Common men with common imaginings will therefore continue to imagine that the inside of the Earth is vastly hot whatever the Science of the moment tells them, the difficulty with " Science" being that it changes its mind like a woman who isn't quite sure but who doesn't even know herself how unsatisfied she is. "Science" is just as likely as not to discover tomorrow that the inside of the Earth is an iceberg, and the day after to offer convincing evidence that it is as hollow as a drum. But Science never makes a mistake, however, about the difference between gold and radium, about the measurement of a degree, about the analysis of light. Like the Eternal Feminine, it may become bewildered among the tilings it cannot touch and handle, among souls and interiors and little things of that sort, but like the same Eternal Feminine it never hesitates nor errs about the colours that suit it Or the number of yards to, a dress or the commercial superiority of a piece of gold to a piece of silver. You must always recollect this when you meet anybody who claims to have "Science" on his side. Ho might better claim to have the " Church,' although he wouldn't like to be told so, for the "Church" is old enough to know that if you change your mind quickly you generally have to change back again, and that it is more dignified never to change your mind until you simply must. So what is inside the Earth? Since gold is washed out of it there must be heaps and heaps of gold. Since radium is found in the crust there may well be heaps and heaps of radium inside. And since iron and copper and lead and tin and every metal which you can think of oozes out in the great oozings which have made mining possible, there must be a great metallic core not very far away. Probably, instead of metals being scarce, < metals are the commonest of common things in the makeup of the world. The Earth may well have cooled, supposing it cooled, just fie a smelting charge cools, with the " slag" on top and the pure metal within. The "slag" may bo the rocks as we know them, the least metallic part of the Earth, that floated up out of the huge boiling and set first. Within is the pure metal, the true ore tliat isn't even " ore," but already refined metal gold in bullion, iron in pigs, copper in bars, tin in ingots, laid out in Nature's storehouse, waiting there to be looted by the first great adventurers who break through. For that is always the way. The treasure that is worth having'is always hard to win, but being won is without limit or price, even when it is buried in the interior of the Earth..