Human Life (Illustrated)

In reviewing the facts concerning humanity, which are well authenticated at the present date, with the object of getting a composite view of the greatest of all “world riddles”—“Life”—possibly nothing tends so largely to expand our mental horizon as a study of the earth itself or man’s place of abode. The ideas of the educated and cultured mind, at the beginning of the twentieth century, upon cosmogony, are necessarily of such a character that man’s heretofore undisputed boast of being the objective and acme of creation or evolution is forced into that great mass of theories which science has proven to be absolutely untenable. Since the relative importance of the factors of heredity and adaptation has become known, the environment, or conditions surrounding man’s existence in[10] times past, is of exceptional importance, as, from an understanding of these prehistoric limitations, we are better able to judge what must have been the achievement of the individual and the race than we could be when in ignorance of these facts.
The length of prehistoric time (so far as our earth is concerned) has been the subject of much intelligent labor and thought, as well as the occasion for much dissenting of opinion and more or less designed misstatement. Until very recently, it has been difficult to reconcile the theories, as promulgated by the authorities in the various departments of science; but, notwithstanding this, some light may be obtained by the summarization of the most plausible hypotheses now advocated. We cannot take the space to go into detail concerning these, but will merely touch upon the most salient points.
The constancy of the supply of heat furnished by the sun and the division of the year into definite seasons was one of the first phenomena which attracted the attention of man at the dawn of history, and in the many accounts of the creation which we[11] find in literature we see the feeble attempts of man to account for what he observed. Although the knowledge which we have at the present time is not complete enough to warrant any feeling of pride, yet we do know enough to say, with certainty, some things concerning the solar system. We know that our sun cannot forever radiate away its heat into space without sometime becoming as cold or colder than we are, unless the energy which it is losing in the form of heat be restored to it by some means not at this time known. Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) has calculated that at the present rate of solar radiation, which amounts to about twenty-eight calories per minute, per square centimeter, at the distance of the mean radius of the earth’s orbit, it would have taken somewhat more than fifteen million years for the heat generated by the contraction of the sun’s mass from the orbit of the outer planet, Neptune, to its present size, to have been radiated away into space. This means that gravity, as a source of heat development, at the rate of solar radiation now known, would account for, perhaps,[12] twenty million years’ expenditure of energy in reducing the sun’s diameter to but one-thirteen-thousandth part of what it once was. Not only does the nebular hypothesis fall short of accounting for the facts, as will subsequently be shown in this one particular of the length of time during which our solar system has existed, but it does not account for the variation in the obliquity of the poles of the planets, which are the attendants upon the sun; nor does gravitative attraction alone enable us to account for the tremendous velocities of some of the stars through space, such as Arcturus,—so that it may be safely assumed that we shall be forced to modify our ideas as to the value of the nebular hypothesis as a working basis, before we can harmonize our deductions from astronomical and geological grounds. Fortunately, the study of the spiral nebulæ has done much to elucidate our conceptions of the formation of the planetary systems, and from the discoveries made concerning these highly attenuated bodies of matter, a new hypothesis has been formed which will completely harmonize,[13] perhaps, with these above stated facts, which could not be made to accord with the nebular theory as previously held.
One source of the continued acquisition of energy by our sun, whose value is hard to estimate, is the shooting stars, or meteors, which constantly fall into it. Astronomical records show that, from the earth alone, no less than twenty million shooting stars are daily within the limits of vision, and inasmuch as the solar system is moving with a velocity of some twenty miles per second through space, it will be seen that the number of meteors which would come within the influence of the sun, being as it is about one and one-third million times the volume of the earth, would be practically infinite.