So in mineralogy the microscope and the tiny crystal governed; the molecules of the crystal, and the chemical atoms of the molecule. Science was headed toward the infinitely little, though later, by way of the spectroscope, it was to leap to the infinitely big of the heavens. I never learned to think the universe finite.
Professor Shaler wrote in 1893, “In the next century there will be a state of science in which the unknown will be conceived as peopled with powers whose existence is justly and necessarily inferred from the knowledge which has been obtained from their manifestations. In other words, it seems to me that the naturalist is most likely to approach the position of the philosophical theologian by paths which at first seemed to lie far apart from his domain.” Just this has happened in the world of galaxies and electrons, producing Einstein and Planck, Jeans and Eddington, Hubble and Hoyle. And I suspect that sea bottoms and volcanoes are “peopled with powers” yet to be inferred.
Through Josiah Cooke and his wonders of projection apparatus; through Cook’s nephew Oliver Huntington and his mineral crystals; through John Eliot Wolff, whose assistant in optical microscopy I became; through Robert Jackson with his museum collection technique and the hexagon plates on fossil sea urchins; through all these I was introduced to the laboratory collections and instruments. I found a fascinating world.
The theater, too, furthered my education. Like many Harvard students, I “suped” for several great actors and actresses, among them Julia Marlowe and Sarah Bernhardt. And in one play I even had a speaking part: “My lord, Posthumus is without.” I also practiced legerdemain as amateur assistant to Kellar and Hermann, who called me out of the audience and pulled rabbits out of my coat and eggs out of my mouth. Thus I learned of the psychology of audiences, how to experiment in public, and how easily deluded is the average mind. Just so nature may delude, if the scientist doesn’t keep his wits about him. But I also learned the value of vivid demonstration before students. A great exponent of this method of teaching is Professor Hubert Alyea of Princeton. His chemical experimentation is marvellous. His chemistry textbook is modern physical chemistry at its best. He demonstrates that the art of the magician has come down to the twentieth century and that even mathematical science may pass over to the layman. I suspect that geophysics does not need to be buried under differential equations as it is today. Certainly experimental volcanology made exciting at the lecture table could work wonders in getting the globe explored.
At Harvard we were taught that geology was a detective history. Vaguely, the same fossils were the same age. Vaguely, man had come from a fish which climbed up on the land. It was much later that radio activity of rocks was accepted as setting ages in millions of years. King and Kelvin taught us that the age of the earth was 24 million years and the sun was dying. A half century later, 2,000 million years was the figure and the sun was heating up. Now cosmogonists talk easily of 10,000 million years as an item in star history. I have learned that one can have any theory he chooses, and that some new discovery will probably reverse it. A discovery is the uncovering of an appealing, bright idea.
The idea of geology as history based on Darwin’s evolution never took root in my consciousness. Geology to me is the science of the globe. Science studies how things work, how things change, how they accomplish what they do, how they grow, and how they compare. It does not study the “why,” or the necessity for an origin of anything. Originating is eternally in progress. Astronomy today is giving up origins. History based on a few relics seems futile. Relics, or specimens, must be compared with action.
Guessing that we must have come from a fish, with no evolution sequence in successive strata and no mammals whatever in very ancient strata and no preservation of soft creatures possible, seems a contradiction of Darwin’s own testimony. He insisted on “the imperfection of the geological record.” But he had no conception that the Cambrian was 500 million years B.C., nor that the fiery Keewatin of Lake Superior was 1,800 million years B.C. Darwin knew that the bivalve brachiopod Lingula, now alive in quiet seas, is exactly the same today as it was then.
Lingula is found fossilized in the intermediate geologic eras. We have no proof that intelligent beings in ships from unknown lands did not dredge him up in Cambrian time. Five hundred million years is so absurdly long that there may have been at least twenty different flowerings of intelligence on the earth, having no relation to us. Continents are places of catastrophe. Sea bottoms are places of constancy. Man lives on continents, and his fossilized bones are short-lived.
If each Adam preceded a new humankind of 100,000 years, the time since the Cambrian allows for 5,000 deluges, or eruptive conflagrations. Each one would exterminate that particular Adam’s descendants. If glacial periods are deluges, we know their scratched boulders back to 400 million years before Lingula. These older ice sheets were in Canada. But we know fiery floods of lava 1,300 million years before Lingula, on the north shore of Lake Superior.
We have not one particle of evidence that before the race was killed off primordial volcanologists, who were very queer looking chaps, might have studied those eruptions with expensive instruments. Certainly they had a lot of copper at their disposal. Perhaps the great lakes were a continental sea, and some ancestor of Lingula was scooped up for food by those doomed beings.