It is time to reassert with increasing emphasis the personal responsibility of the individual, and to insist upon the enthronement and guidance of conscience. There are certainly social and economic reasons for crime, some of which the writer has pointed out elsewhere, but the chief fact in human life is the power of self-determination. The chief causes of crime, outside of personal and moral degradation, are psychical and not physical. The reader of history can not fail to have noted that relation of prevalent ideas to conduct which is so conspicuous in human affairs. The scenes of blood and desolation characteristic of the French Revolution are directly traceable to the doctrines which prepared the way for anarchy, but not for rational freedom.
We have had our attention directed to the contagion of suicide which has marked the last half decade. But Lecky tells us that suicide was made practically unknown in the civilized world by the spread of Christianity and its beliefs in the dignity and sanctity of man. The present contagion will disappear not as the result of food, or raiment, or houses, or any other material good, but by a revival of practical faith in the human soul and its capacity, in human righteousness and its obligation.
A CENTURY OF GEOLOGY.
By Prof. JOSEPH LE CONTE.
[Concluded.]
THE AGE OF THE EARTH.
Until almost the beginning of the present century the general belief in all Christian countries was that not only the earth and man, but the whole cosmos, began to exist about six thousand to seven thousand years ago; furthermore, that all was made at once without natural process, and have remained substantially unchanged ever since. This is the old doctrine of the supernatural origin and substantial permanency of the earth and its features. Among intelligent and especially scientific men this doctrine, even in the eighteenth century, began to be questioned, although not publicly; for in 1751 Buffon was compelled by the Sorbonne to retract certain views concerning the age of the earth, published in his Natural History in 1749.[1] Remnants of the old belief lingered even into the early part of the present century, and may even yet be found hiding away in some of the remote corners of civilized countries. But with the birth of geology, and especially through the work of Hutton in Scotland, Cuvier in France, and William Smith in England, the much greater—the inconceivably great—antiquity of the earth and the origin of its present forms, by gradual changes which are still going on, was generally acknowledged. Indeed, as already said, this is the fundamental idea of geology, without which it could not exist as a science.
Geology has its own measures of time—in eras, periods, epochs, ages, etc.—but it is natural and right that we should desire more accurate estimates by familiar standards. How old, then, is the earth, especially the inhabited earth, in years? Geologists have attempted to answer this question by estimates based on the rates of sedimentation and erosion, or else on the rate of changes of organic forms by struggle for life and survival of the fittest. Physicists have attempted to answer the same question by calculations based on known laws of dissipation of energy in a cooling body, such as the sun or the earth. The results of the two methods differ widely. The estimates of the geologists are enormous, and growing ever greater as the conditions of the problem are better understood. Nothing less than several hundred million years will serve his purpose. The estimates of the physicists are much more moderate, and apparently growing less with each revision. The latest results of King and Kelvin give only twenty to thirty millions.[2] This the geologist declares is absurdly inadequate. He can not work freely in so narrow a space—he has not elbow room.