WHAT SCIENCE TEACHES

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume VIII, Issue 1426, 15 September 1881, Page 2

WHAT SCIENCE TEACHES

Pbotbssor Devtos, the American scientist, who has been lecturing in Mol bourne, holds aa regards the future of this world that the land is to rise higher and higher out of the water, and the climate is to improve in the aget U> come, till perhaps a hundred millions of years has passed, " People often " he says, " aaw.nl if this world wouKJ last for ever, and his reply was that there was no doubt it would come to an end when man had become fully developed, and when it could sustain man no longer. That time would b.i when the mountains were tens of miles hitjh, when the crevices or valleys of the earth were tens of miles deep, when the rives wore shrunk to rivulet-*, when the seas were gone, when the oceans had dwindled to lakes, and the lakes had vanished off the face of the earth, when the plains were so hiyh ana the air so thin that human life would become mi impossibility, when trees were diminished and shrubs were no more. Wh«n those and other oonsequent things occurred the end of the world would draw nigh ; but what of humanity then ? He was not troubled abont humanity even then, for he believed the world had a spirit just as truly as a man had, and the spirit world of this planet would be man's future home. In th;»t spirit world, safe and secure, we should look down with satisfaction and watch the dissolution of this planet as it died in convulsive agony, and burst into atoms, and those atoms flew off to make comets and meteors, and went back to the sun in fragments — there to keep up that fire which was to warm and light up other worlds."