CHAPTER I
(JANUARY)
In the beginning the earth was without form and void.
—Genesis 1:1-2.
IN THE BEGINNING
I. How the Worlds and Myself Were Born
I've been through fire and water, I tell you! From my earliest pebblehood the wildest things you could imagine have been happening to this world of ours, and I have been right in the midst of them.
HOW MR. APOLLO TURNED ON THE LIGHT
The first scenes of all in my strange, eventful history remind me of the old Greek story about Apollo and that boy of his—Phaeton. Apollo's business, you remember, was to take the sun through the skies every day in his golden chariot, so that people could see to get about. It was a ticklish job, as the horses were fiery. As a rule, however, things went fairly well. To be sure, there were overdone days occasionally, just as there are now. Then the crops would wither and the birds and brooks stop singing. This, as the little Greek boys and girls believed, was because Apollo's horses ran too near the earth.
HOW MR. APOLLO TURNED ON THE LIGHT
Behold the sun-god starting on his daily round! Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn, precedes him scattering flowers, the lovely colors of the morning sky. The other figures are the early hours.
The Greek poets used to play with these myth stories a good deal, changing them to suit their poetic fancy. Theocritus, for example, in a beautiful fragment that has come down to us, paints this picture of the breaking day:
"Dawn, up from the sea to the sky,
By her fleet-footed steeds was drawn."
You see, according to this poet's conception, Miss Dawn had a chariot of her own.
But nothing serious happened until one time Phaeton persuaded father to let him drive the sun chariot for a day. The horses, feeling at once a new and weak hand on the reins, tore out of the regular road and went dashing right and left. They even got so near the North Pole that the ice began to melt. They fairly flew down toward the earth, set the mountains smoking, and dried up all the springs and most of the rivers.
THEN THINGS BEGAN TO HAPPEN
They dried up a certain great lake, so that there is to this day the Libyan Desert in Africa, where this lake used to be. They made the very sea shrink so that there were "wide naked plains where once its billows rose."
Finally Mother Earth called on Jupiter Pluvius, as god of thunder, rain, and storms, to stop Phaeton and the runaways and put out the fire.
Struck by a bolt of lightning poor Phaeton fell headlong from the skies, and a world-wide rain put out the world-wide fire.
From a cameo by Da Vinci
THE FALL OF PHAETON
(Museum, Florence)
Now, would you believe it, this queer old Old World story may really be true in its way. Of course there never was a sun god and no spoiled boy who did just that thing; although many spoiled boys have tried to set the world on fire and failed because they thought it would be so easy.
But the earth really has been on fire in a sense; that is, has melted from the heat. And in parts where you would least suspect—the rocks. There's where I got into it. And some of these rocks, not more than ten miles[3] from where you live, are either still molten, or continue to melt from time to time; as you can see when lava comes pouring from volcanoes, such as those of Hawaii.
[3] Straight down, of course.
In the days of the Apollo story most men still thought the earth was the centre of the universe; that the sun, moon, and stars moved around it. But Pythagoras, one of the Greek philosophers, had formed a general notion of the truth that the earth is only one planet in a great system. Then, along in the Sixteenth Century, came Copernicus, and by mathematical calculation—he was a fine hand at figures—began to find out things that showed the wise old Greek had made a happy guess. Then Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and others, each working on different parts of the problem, finally settled the question. They found that there are just worlds of worlds, and that ours is only one of them.
About the time of the American Revolution a great French mathematician, Laplace, worked out a story of the origin of the earth which is, briefly, this:
What we know now as the solar system—the sun with its attendant worlds—was once a single big ball of fiery gas, a nebula. As this nebula cooled it shrank, and as it shrank it whirled faster because it had a smaller track in which to turn, and with an equal amount of force would, of course, get around oftener. The faster it whirled the more the outside of it tended to fly off, as water flies off a whirling grindstone or as a stone flies from a sling. This centrifugal or "fly-away" force was greatest at the sun's equator, and it threw off big rings. Afterward, around some centre of greater density in these rings, the gaseous particles in the rest of the ring gathered, so forming spheres. Then some of the spheres themselves threw off rings in the same way which became what are called satellites. The moon, which is our satellite, Laplace supposed to have originated in this way. The ring which Saturn still wears he thought would some day become a satellite.
By permission of the Mount Wilson Observatory
WATCHING THE MAKING OF WORLDS
At first you won't see anything very striking about this picture, perhaps; but doesn't it give you something of a thrill to be told that you are here looking not only at the making of a world, but of worlds of worlds? A whole solar system! In the course of unthinkable time that big, round ball in the center will be the sun, and what appear to be little knots wrapped close around it—they are really far from each other and from the sun—will become rounded worlds like ours. They will be forced into roundness by their own gravity, pulling toward their centers. They don't look any farther apart than the strands in a little sister's braided hair, do they? But remember how small this picture is compared with what it represents. What here show as little dark lines, separating the embryo worlds, are in reality vast spaces, like those you see between the stars at night—millions and millions and millions of miles!
So, you see, the myth story of Phaeton foreshadowed, in a way, the science story of Laplace. For, according to the Laplace theory, the world was on fire; and a big rain storm, lasting for ages, with plenty of thunder and lightning, did help put it out.
This theory of Laplace was long accepted as the true one. Indeed, it was only yesterday, comparatively, that other explanations were offered as to how we came to have a world to stand on. The broadest of these new theories—the one that undertakes to explain the most—is that of Professor Chamberlin, of the University of Chicago.
THE SUN AND HIS PEBBLE WORLDS
However the worlds of our solar system may have been made, when they were done there was the sun in the centre and his worlds travelling around him in their ordered orbits. Nearest the sun is Mercury. Then Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus; then, finally, Neptune nearly 3,000,000,000 miles away and with an orbit so big that Christmas comes only once in 60,000 years!
YOU CAN SEE THESE WORLDS IN THE MAKING
Owing to the more powerful telescopes of to-day, and the amount of exploring among the worlds that has been going on since the time of Laplace, several things have been discovered that have brought his theory into question. For one thing, many more nebulæ have been found in space than were known when Laplace worked out his great conception, and among them all not one has been found with a central mass surrounded by a ring. Moreover, our sharp-eyed telescopes show that Saturn's ring, which Laplace thought was a solid mass, is really made up of a great number of small satellites: baby worlds. The greater number of these nebulæ are like the ones you see in the illustration on [page 5]. They consist of very bright centres with spirals streaming out from opposite sides. Just take a look at the picture. Doesn't the shape of those spirals suggest that the central mass is whirling? And notice the little white lumps here and there. The thinner, veil-like portions of the mass, as well as the "lumps," are supposed to be made of particles of matter, but the lumps to be more condensed. All the particles, big and little, are known to be revolving about the central mass, much as the earth revolves about the sun. The little white lumps, or knots, in the filmy skein are supposed to be worlds in the making. Being larger than the other particles, they draw the smaller to them, according to the same law of gravitation which makes every unsupported thing on earth fall to the ground, because the earth is so much bigger than anything there is on it. Since these bright little lumps behave so much like the worlds we know as planets, and yet are relatively so small, they are called planetessimals, or "little planets." So Professor Chamberlin's idea of the origin of worlds is known as the "planetessimal theory."
HOW YOU CAN WATCH THE WORLD TURN ROUND
Timepieces, you know, are really machines for keeping track of the apparent movement of the sun. Here is a device, as simple as a sun-dial and much simpler than a clock, by which you can record the actual motion of the earth. Sprinkle the surface of the water in a bowl with chalk dust. On this, sift from a piece of paper powdered charcoal or pencil dust, so as to make a clean-cut band extending across the centre and over the edge of the bowl. In the course of several hours you will find that the black band has swept round from east to west, because the water has stood still while the bowl has been carried from west to east by the whirling world.
According to this theory the earth was once a mere baby world like those white lumps, and grew by gathering in its smaller neighbors from time to time by the power of gravitation. The larger it grew the more particles of solid matter it could draw to itself. Then it drew larger masses, for with increased mass came an increased pull of gravity. In the same way the earth is still growing, for it is thought that the shooting stars or meteors we see at night are little planets being gathered in.
II. How the Continents Came Up Out of the Sea
And before I got to be myself at all, while I was still only a part of the big pebble called the Earth, your geography and I lay at the bottom of the sea.
For ages and ages!
This is one of the stories you will find in the literature of science, of how, along with North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia—have I left out any?—I came to land and brought your geography with me.
I remember hearing a pretty young lady say, once upon a time:
"There," said she, "I'm through with geography forever!"
You see, although she had passed with marks around 90, she still had the idea that geography is a book. You and I know, of course, that the real geography isn't a book at all. It's the world itself.
PUTTING THE CONTINENTS ON THE GLOBE
But there was a time when there was no land. It was all water, and the continents were lifted into their places, much as you model a continent in making a relief map; they were sketched out and then filled in. North America, for example. First of all up came that mass in the northeast in what is now Canada; the Laurentian Highlands, as they are called in your geography. They rose very, very slowly, you understand, only a few feet in a thousand years; for Nature has all the time there is and never hurries. These highlands (they are really granite mountains worn down), along with the other rock formations of our continent, are supposed to be the oldest land on the earth. The continents of Europe and the rest were born later. So you see Columbus didn't discover the New World at all; he really came from the New World and discovered the Old!
Next after the highlands north of the St. Lawrence up came the tops of the mountains you see running along the eastern coast, what we now call the Appalachians. Then the Rocky Mountains began to raise their heads and looked eastward toward their brother mountains across a great mediterranean sea, the bottom of which is now the Mississippi Valley. Mediterranean means "middle of the land."
HOW YOUR GEOGRAPHY ROSE OUT OF THE SEA
ADMITTING NEW STATES TO THE MAP
Wisconsin, into which I moved from the Laurentian Highlands in later years, was on the lower end of a long, thin tongue of rock reaching out from these highlands to the southwest. While Wisconsin went on growing, the Alleghanies came up and brought some Middle Atlantic geography with them. Up with all these early settler mountains came, in the course of time, the beginnings of neighbor States. All these big, barren rocks (as they were then), rising and ever rising, age after age, spread more surface to the sun. And the sun, and the wind, and the frost, followed by the lowest forms of plant life—the Adams of the vegetable world—gradually worked the surface of the rock into soil; and so, as we may say, got ready for the spring plowing.
LANDS THE SEA HAS SWALLOWED
Parts of the continents as they used to be but which are now beneath the waters are here shown. Compare this with the globe map in your geography. It is estimated that there are 10,000,000 square miles of this land. You'll hear more about this swallowing habit of the sea in [Chagter X]; but, as you will learn, there's nothing to be frightened about.
By this constant rising and building on of the soil the foundations of our States grew out toward one another in order, according to the constitution of things, "to form a more perfect union." The United States, at a time which, we may say, corresponds to "The Expansion Period" in your school history, grew southward from Wisconsin and westward from the Appalachians until they made continuous land; and there was your Ohio and Indiana and the rest of the North Central group. Below, toward the south, were more big stone islands here and there, the first sketches or blockings out of the Southern States. Florida seems to have been added later, as a final touch; an afterthought, as one of my Wisconsin neighbors puts it. And it was much enlarged by those remarkable little world builders, the corals. Mexico and Central America, of course, are a part of the Rocky Mountain system.
From Gilbert and Brigham's "An Introduction to Physical Geography." By permission of D. Appleton and Company
BUT WON'T WE GO UNDER AGAIN?
These little people of the sea-floor furnish one of the most assuring evidences we have that although the continents rose out of the sea, they will never go under the sea again. These are shell creatures found in the slime dredged from the bottom of the deepest parts of the sea. The shells of creatures that live near shore are found in abundance in our rocks, but these types are found only in the deepest seas. So, since the deep down-wrinklings of the earth that make the sea-basins have never risen, it is probable they never will; and consequently that the up-wrinkles—the continents—will continue to stay above the waters.
It's a wonderful old story, isn't it? But more wonderful still, it always seemed to me, is the story of how they found all this out.
Who do you suppose first told about it? The last people you would ever think of, I'm sure—the oysters!
WHAT THE OYSTERS TOLD XENOPHANES
It sounds like a passage from "Alice in Wonderland," or "Through the Looking-Glass," doesn't it? But it's a fact. Away back, more than 2,000 years ago, a wise Greek called Xenophanes, who lived in a place called Colophon, and so was called Xenophanes of Colophon, said that he thought the rocks of the mountain sides must once have been under the sea because of the oyster shells that were found embedded in many of them.
HOW THE OYSTERS TOLD THE GREAT SECRET
Here is a good example of the thing that led wise old Xenophanes of Colophon to make the startling assertion that the mountains were once at the bottom of the sea. These are the shells of oysters embedded in limestone—which, by the way, the shells of the oysters themselves helped make—and this piece of stone is from the top of a high mountain.
"For," said Xenophanes of Colophon, "how else could the oyster shells have got there? Who ever heard of oysters climbing a mountain?"
Another evidence that lands come up out of the sea is this: Even before the days of Scott and Maryatt and Fenimore Cooper, men—and, of course, boys—were interested in caves that face upon the sea. They are such jolly places for pirates, and for boys playing pirate, and for mermaids drying their hair. It was plain that down where the waves in storms could reach them the sea itself bored out these caves. But how about those caves in the cliffs high above the waves? The sea must have made them, too, once upon a time when the land was lower in the water. Then the land was raised.
Still more striking was the fact that not only caves but old sea beaches were found on hill and mountain slopes far from the sea, sometimes hundreds of miles inland. You can tell the old beaches by their shape and the way in which the pebbles are sorted by size, just as you find them on beaches to-day.
THE BAKED APPLE AND THE BULGING WORLD
The causes of the rise and fall of the sea coasts are many, and there are things about these movements not yet understood. By what wonderful machinery, then (we might naturally ask), were the continents themselves lifted out of the sea? To this, which would seem much the harder question of the two, the answer is simple; as simple as a baked apple. You know an apple that goes into the oven with a smooth, neat skin comes out covered with wrinkles. Now suppose, instead of a little, hot apple, covered with a thin skin, you have a big, hot earth covered with a thick crust of stone, and the inside of the earth shrinking all the time as the inside of the apple shrank away from its skin. The rock skin would wrinkle, and the wrinkles, rising out of the seas that then covered it everywhere, would make continents.
THE RISE AND FALL OF JUPITER SERAPIS
In this account of the ups and downs of land and sea I must tell you the story of Jupiter Serapis. In the days of the Romans this temple, for his honor, stood on the seashore near Naples. Of that temple only three pillars remain, but they answer a very important question. On these pillars, over twenty feet above sea-level, is a belt of holes bored in the stone by a certain shelled sea-creature, one of the barnacle family; so evidently these pillars must, at some time, have sunk, as shown in the second picture, and then risen again, as shown in the third, which represents them as they stand to-day.
Another interesting thing is that the third picture—observe—shows a volcano that isn't in the other two. Following a series of earthquake shocks in 1538 the earth opened and out popped hot stones and ashes and built themselves into a small volcano right before everybody; for it was all done in a short time, and you may be sure the frightened people kept their eyes on it, and they named it Monte Nuovo, which is Italian for "New Mountain."
"And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so."
According to the planetessimal theory the way in which the seas were made was this:
Owing to the collision—the "bang"—of the planetessimals against the earth, and against each other as they met at the "terminal station," heat was generated. The compression, the squeezing together, of the earth from its own weight—the gravity pull of the whole mass toward the centre—generated still more heat, and the heat and pressure drove the gases out of the rock. These gases included hydrogen and oxygen. These two gases cooling and combining themselves, in a way they have, became water, and there were other gases, such as nitrogen and carbon gas, that helped to make the air.
WHEN THE SEAS WERE ALL IN THE SKY
At first the water was in the form of dense clouds of overhanging vapor which, growing bigger and bigger, finally fell in rain. The heat, made by the pressure of the outside of the earth toward the centre as the earth kept growing, caused volcanic explosions. But there were far more volcanoes in those early days when the earth was settling down, and being "settled up," as it were, by these energetic pioneers in the fields of space—the planetessimals—and the surface became pitted with craters. In these great catch basins the rain was stored, and, as for ages the rain kept falling faster than the vapor rose from the earth, many of these bodies of water united, and so formed the lakes, the river systems, the oceans, and the seas.
THE FOUR GREAT FEATURES OF THE BIBLE STORY
All of which, while it differs so much from the theory of Laplace, does not affect the Bible outline of the origin of the earth. For these four great things must still have been: (1) an earth without form, and void; (2) a great deep; (3) upon its face darkness from the continuing masses of black rain-laden clouds which overhung it and shut out the sun; (4) the final dividing up of supply between the vapor of the clouds ("the waters above the earth") and "the waters upon the earth," so that at last the dark cloud curtain disappeared, and the sun began to rule the day. "Let there be light."
But good-by to Phaeton and the story of an original glowing ball which cooled off on the outside. If the earth grew bit by bit instead of being whirled off in one fiery mass by the sun it was never any hotter than it is now, if as hot. It grew hot by being pressed together by its own weight, and by the blows of additional little worlds as they fell upon it.
But on one thing everybody agrees, that the rocks, as you go toward the earth's centre, have been and still are in a molten state; that this rock, when it cools, becomes granite, all full of little crystals like a lump of sugar, and that the Granites are one of the F. F. E.'s.[4]
[4] First Families on Earth.
I, as you see, am a Granite. So, besides going through fire and water—yes, and ice, as you will learn—and having many strange and wearing adventures both by land and sea—I'm "awfully" old. Older than you think. I looked it up in the family record called the "Geological Column"—just the other day. That column gives my age as "80+." This means I'm 80,000,000 years old, going on 81! (The plus sign, in geology language, means "going on"; or, "and then some," as a certain slangful high school freshman puts it.)
But I don't think I show my age. Do you?
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
Who wants to sit and be talked to all the time? When boys and girls are playing games, the greatest pleasure is in taking part, and it's the same way in the Wonderland of Books. Books mean most to those who "get into the game"; who help chase after the answers to things. This hunting for answers up and down among the books is one of the interesting games we're going to play; and those of you who don't come in will miss a lot of fun. That's all I've got to say! Let's begin like this:
In the Greek myth stories what else was Mr. Apollo supposed to do for the world and its people besides turning on the light?[5]
[5] Answers to all these questions at the ends of chapters will be found in books you can easily get hold of—encyclopædias, dictionaries, and school-books; or books usually found in home, school, or public libraries. Words in parenthesis or italics indicate the headings where the information referred to will be found.
Why doesn't the force of the earth, whirling along as it does at 19 miles a second, cause the wind to blow us all away? (Earth.)
What is the difference between a planet and a sun?
How does the earth compare in size with its brother planets of the sun family?
How often would Christmas come around if we lived on the moon?
What causes different phases of the moon?
Why may we be said to have eclipses of the moon every month?
"Moon" and "month" sound a good deal alike when you come to think of it. Don't you wonder why? "Moon" comes from a word meaning "to measure." You'll find the rest of the word-story of the moon in any dictionary that is big enough to tell about the origin of words.
By the way—speaking of the timekeepers in the sky—don't forget to look up the lives of the great astronomers mentioned in this chapter. You will find, among other things, how Galileo, when only eighteen years of age, helped to give us our clocks and watches by counting his pulse-beats while watching a hanging lamp swing back and forth in the Cathedral of Pisa; how he found out who "The Man in the Moon" really is and what the "Milky Way" is made of; how he invented the wonderful glass for playing hide and seek among the worlds, and with it found four moons in one night!
Yes, and how do you suppose he found that the sun is going round and round like a top, just as the earth does? It was the simplest thing! You'll see!
Old Father Science may be said to be a Santa Claus who keeps a curiosity-shop. His pack is not only full of curious things but he is always "springing surprises on us," as our High School Boy puts it. For example, one of the most curious as well as picturesque evidences that great stretches of land sink under the sea from time to time is furnished by the English swallows. Like many other wealthy people, they spend their winters in Algiers, and they find their way over the Mediterranean, not by any lands they can see between coast and coast—for there are none—but by lands that used to be there, thousands upon thousands of years ago.
But how do the swallows know? They don't. Is it instinct? No. (Whatever instinct is!) Then why do they do it? Look it up and you'll see.[6] Yes, and you'll see that we have habits that we get in the same way; our habits of bowing, for example, because it's the custom, although few people know how it originated.
[6] "Colin Clout's Calendar," by Grant Allen.