TIME AND TIDE

LECTURE I.


It is my privilege to address you this afternoon on a subject in which
science and poetry are blended in a happy conjunction. If there be a
peculiar fascination about the earlier chapters of any branch of
history, how great must be the interest which attaches to that most
primeval of all terrestrial histories which relates to the actual
beginnings of this globe on which we stand.

In our efforts to grope into the dim recesses of this awful past, we
want the aid of some steadfast light which shall illumine the dark
places without the treachery of the will-o'-the-wisp. In the absence
of that steadfast light, vague conjectures as to the beginning of
things could never be entitled to any more respect than was due to
mere matters of speculation.

Of late, however, the required light has been to some considerable
extent forthcoming, and the attempt has been made, with no little
success, to elucidate a most interesting and wonderful chapter of an
exceedingly remote history. To chronicle this history is the object of
the present lectures before this Institution.

First, let us be fully aware of the extraordinary remoteness of that
period of which our history treats. To attempt to define that period
chronologically would be utterly futile. When we have stated that it
is more ancient than almost any other period which we can discuss, we
have expressed all that we are really entitled to say. Yet this
conveys not a little. It directs us to look back through all the ages
of modern human history, through the great days of ancient Greece and
Rome, back through the times when Egypt and Assyria were names of
renown, through the days when Nineveh and Babylon were mighty and
populous cities in the zenith of their glory. Back earlier still to
those more ancient nations of which we know hardly anything, and
still earlier to the prehistoric man, of whom we know less; back,
finally, to the days when man first trod on this planet, untold ages
ago. Here is indeed a portentous retrospect from most points of view,
but it is only the commencement of that which our subject suggests.

For man is but the final product of the long anterior ages during
which the development of life seems to have undergone an exceedingly
gradual elevation. Our retrospect now takes its way along the vistas
opened up by the geologists. We look through the protracted tertiary
ages, when mighty animals, now generally extinct, roamed over the
continents. Back still earlier through those wondrous secondary
periods, where swamps or oceans often covered what is now dry land,
and where mighty reptiles of uncouth forms stalked and crawled and
swam through the old world and the new. Back still earlier through
those vitally significant ages when the sunbeams were being garnered
and laid aside for man's use in the great forests, which were
afterwards preserved by being transformed into seams of coal. Back
still earlier through endless thousands of years, when lustrous
fishes abounded in the oceans; back again to those periods
characterized by the lower types of life; and still earlier to that
incredibly remote epoch when life itself began to dawn on our
awakening globe. Even here the epoch of our present history can hardly
be said to have been reached. We have to look through a long
succession of ages still antecedent. The geologist, who has hitherto
guided our view, cannot render us much further assistance; but the
physicist is at hand--he teaches us that the warm globe on which life
is beginning has passed in its previous stages through every phase of
warmth, of fervour, of glowing heat, of incandescence, and of actual
fusion; and thus at last our retrospect reaches to that particular
period of our earth's past history which is specially illustrated by
the modern doctrine of Time and Tide.

The present is the clue to the past. It is the steady application of
this principle which has led to such epoch-making labours as those by
which Lyell disclosed the origin of the earth's crust, Darwin the
origin of species, Max Müller the origin of language. In our present
subject the course is equally clear. Study exactly what is going on at
present, and then have the courage to apply consistently and
rigorously what we have learned from the present to the interpretation
of the past.

Thus we begin with the ripple of the tide on the sea-beach which we
see to-day. The ebb and the flow of the tide are the present
manifestations of an agent which has been constantly at work. Let that
present teach us what tides must have done in the indefinite past.