A minor though very important influence in the progress of astronomy has been the provision, by the expenditure of great wealth in America, of great telescopes and equipments.
In 1877 Sir George Darwin started a line of mathematical research which has been very fruitful and is of great future promise for astronomy. As recently as last April, at the Royal Astronomical Society, two important papers were read—one by Mr. Cowell and the other by Mr. Stratton—which have their roots in Sir George Darwin’s work. The former was led to suggest that the day is lengthening ten times as rapidly as had been supposed, and the latter showed that in all probability the planets had all turned upside down since their birth.
And yet M. Brunetière and his friends wish us to believe that science is bankrupt and has no new things in store for humanity.
Geology.—In the field of geological research the main feature in the past twenty-five years has been the increasing acceptance of the evolutionary as contrasted with the uniformitarian view of geological phenomena. The great work of Suess, ‘Das Antlitz der Erde,’ is undoubtedly the most important contribution to physical geology within the period. The first volume appeared in 1885, and the impetus which it has given to the science may be judged of by the epithet applied to the views for which Suess is responsible—‘the New Geology.’ Suess attempts to trace the orderly sequence of the principal changes in the earth’s crust since it first began to form. He strongly opposes the old theory of elevation, and accounts for the movements as due to differential collapse of the crust, accompanied by folding due to tangential stress. Among special results gained by geologists in the period we survey may be cited new views as to the origin of the crystalline schists, favouring a return to something like the hypogene origin advocated by Lyell; the facts as to deep-sea deposits, now in course of formation, embodied in the ‘Challenger’ reports on that subject: the increasing discrimination and tracking of those minor divisions of strata called ‘zones’; the assignment of the Olenellus fauna of Cambrian age to a position earlier than that of the Paradoxides fauna; the discovery of Radiolaria in palæozoic rocks by special methods of examination, and the recognition of Graptolites as indices of geological horizons in lower palæozoic beds. Glacially eroded rocks in boulder-clays of permo-carboniferous age have been recognised in many parts of the world (e.g., Australia and South Africa), and thus the view put forward by W. T. Blanford as to the occurrence of the same phenomena in conglomerates of this age in India is confirmed. Eozoon is finally abandoned as owing its structure to an organism. The oldest fossiliferous beds known to us are still far from the beginning of life. They contain a highly developed and varied animal fauna—and something like the whole of the older moiety of rocks of aqueous origin have failed as yet to present us with any remains of the animals or plants which must have inhabited the seas which deposited them. The boring of a coral reef initiated by Professor Sollas at the Nottingham meeting of the British Association in 1893 was successfully carried out, and a depth of 1,114½ feet reached. Information of great value to geologists was thus obtained.
Fig. 13.
The Freshwater Jelly-fish of Regent’s Park (Limnocodium Sowerbii) magnified five times linear.