A History of Science, vol 3 - Henry Smith Williams (top 10 novels txt) 📗

to explain all the major phenomena of the universe as due, directly or indirectly, to the gravitational impact of such meteoric particles, or specks of cosmic dust, as comets are composed of. Nebulae are vast cometary clouds, with particles more or less widely separated, giving off gases through meteoric collisions, internal or external, and perhaps glowing also with electrical or phosphorescent light. Gravity eventually brings the nebular particles into closer aggregations, and increased collisions finally vaporize the entire mass, forming planetary nebulae and gaseous stars.

Continued condensation may make the stellar mass hotter and more luminous for a time, but eventually leads to its liquefaction, and ultimate consolidation—

the aforetime nebulae becoming in the end a dark or planetary star.

 

The exact correlation which Lockyer attempts to point out between successive stages of meteoric condensation and the various types of observed stellar bodies does not meet with unanimous acceptance. Mr.

Ranyard, for example, suggests that the visible nebulae may not be nascent stars, but emanations from stars, and that the true pre-stellar nebulae are invisible until condensed to stellar proportions. But such details aside, the broad general hypothesis that all the bodies of the universe are, so to speak, of a single species—

that nebulae (including comets), stars of all types, and planets, are but varying stages in the life history of a single race or type of cosmic organisms—is accepted by the dominant thought of our time as having the highest warrant of scientific probability.

 

All this, clearly, is but an amplification of that nebular hypothesis which, long before the spectroscope gave us warrant to accurately judge our sidereal neighbors, had boldly imagined the development of stars out of nebulae and of planets out of stars. But Lockyer’s hypothesis does not stop with this. Having traced the developmental process from the nebular to the dark star, it sees no cause to abandon this dark star to its fate by assuming, as the original speculation assumed, that this is a culminating and final stage of cosmic existence.

For the dark star, though its molecular activities have come to relative stability and impotence, still retains the enormous potentialities of molar motion; and clearly, where motion is, stasis is not. Sooner or later, in its ceaseless flight through space, the dark star must collide with some other stellar body, as Dr.

Croll imagines of the dark bodies which his “pre-nebular theory” postulates. Such collision may be long delayed; the dark star may be drawn in comet-like circuit about thousands of other stellar masses, and be hurtled on thousands of diverse parabolic or elliptical orbits, before it chances to collide—but that matters not: “billions are the units in the arithmetic of eternity,”

and sooner or later, we can hardly doubt, a collision must occur. Then without question the mutual impact must shatter both colliding bodies into vapor, or vapor combined with meteoric fragments; in short, into a veritable nebula, the matrix of future worlds.

Thus the dark star, which is the last term of one series of cosmic changes, becomes the first term of another series—at once a post-nebular and a pre-nebular condition; and the nebular hypothesis, thus amplified, ceases to be a mere linear scale, and is rounded out to connote an unending series of cosmic cycles, more nearly satisfying the imagination.

 

In this extended view, nebulae and luminous stars are but the infantile and adolescent stages of the life history of the cosmic individual; the dark star, its adult stage, or time of true virility. Or we may think of the shrunken dark star as the germ-cell, the pollen-grain, of the cosmic organism. Reduced in size, as becomes a germ-cell, to a mere fraction of the nebular body from which it sprang, it yet retains within its seemingly non-vital body all the potentialities of the original organism, and requires only to blend with a fellow-cell to bring a new generation into being. Thus may the cosmic race, whose aggregate census makes up the stellar universe, be perpetuated—individual solar systems, such as ours, being born, and growing old, and dying to live again in their descendants, while the universe as a whole maintains its unified integrity throughout all these internal mutations—passing on, it may be, by infinitesimal stages, to a culmination hopelessly beyond human comprehension.

 

III. THE NEW SCIENCE OF PALEONTOLOGY

WILLIAM SMITH AND FOSSIL SHELLS

Ever since Leonardo da Vinci first recognized the true character of fossils, there had been here and there a man who realized that the earth’s rocky crust is one gigantic mausoleum. Here and there a dilettante had filled his cabinets with relics from this monster crypt; here and there a philosopher had pondered over them—questioning whether perchance they had once been alive, or whether they were not mere abortive souvenirs of that time when the fertile matrix of the earth was supposed to have

 

“teemed at a birth

Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms, Limbed and full grown.”

 

Some few of these philosophers—as Robert Hooke and Steno in the seventeenth century, and Moro, Leibnitz, Buffon, Whitehurst, Werner, Hutton, and others in the eighteenth—had vaguely conceived the importance of fossils as records of the earth’s ancient history, but the wisest of them no more suspected the full import of the story written in the rocks than the average stroller in a modern museum suspects the meaning of the hieroglyphs on the case of a mummy.

 

It was not that the rudiments of this story are so very hard to decipher—though in truth they are hard enough—but rather that the men who made the attempt had all along viewed the subject through an atmosphere of preconception, which gave a distorted image. Before this image could be corrected it was necessary that a man should appear who could see without prejudice, and apply sound commonsense to what he saw. And such a man did appear towards the close of the century, in the person of William Smith, the English surveyor. He was a self-taught man, and perhaps the more independent for that, and he had the gift, besides his sharp eyes and receptive mind, of a most tenacious memory. By exercising these faculties, rare as they are homely, he led the way to a science which was destined, in its later developments, to shake the structure of established thought to its foundations.

 

Little enough did William Smith suspect, however, that any such dire consequences were to come of his act when he first began noticing the fossil shells that here and there are to be found in the stratified rocks and soils of the regions over which his surveyor’s duties led him. Nor, indeed, was there anything of such apparent revolutionary character in the facts which he unearthed; yet in their implications these facts were the most disconcerting of any that had been revealed since the days of Copernicus and Galileo. In its bald essence, Smith’s discovery was simply this: that the fossils in the rocks, instead of being scattered haphazard, are arranged in regular systems, so that any given stratum of rock is labelled by its fossil population; and that the order of succession of such groups of fossils is always the same in any vertical series of strata in which they occur. That is to say, if fossil A underlies fossil B in any given region, it never overlies it in any other series; though a kind of fossils found in one set of strata may be quite omitted in another. Moreover, a fossil once having disappeared never reappears in any later stratum.

 

From these novel facts Smith drew the commonsense inference that the earth had had successive populations of creatures, each of which in its turn had become extinct. He partially verified this inference by comparing the fossil shells with existing species of similar orders, and found that such as occur in older strata of the rocks had no counterparts among living species. But, on the whole, being eminently a practical man, Smith troubled himself but little about the inferences that might be drawn from his facts. He was chiefly concerned in using the key he had discovered as an aid to the construction of the first geological map of England ever attempted, and he left to others the untangling of any snarls of thought that might seem to arise from his discovery of the succession of varying forms of life on the globe.

 

He disseminated his views far and wide, however, in the course of his journeyings—quite disregarding the fact that peripatetics went out of fashion when the printing-press came in—and by the beginning of the nineteenth century he had begun to have a following among the geologists of England. It must not for a moment be supposed, however, that his contention regarding the succession of strata met with immediate or general acceptance. On the contrary, it was most bitterly antagonized. For a long generation after the discovery was made, the generality of men, prone as always to strain at gnats and swallow camels, preferred to believe that the fossils, instead of being deposited in successive ages, had been swept all at once into their present positions by the current of a mighty flood—and that flood, needless to say, the Noachian deluge. Just how the numberless successive strata could have been laid down in orderly sequence to the depth of several miles in one such fell cataclysm was indeed puzzling, especially after it came to be admitted that the heaviest fossils were not found always at the bottom; but to doubt that this had been done in some way was rank heresy in the early days of the nineteenth century.

CUVIER AND FOSSIL VERTEBRATES

But once discovered, William Smith’s unique facts as to the succession of forms in the rocks would not down. There was one most vital point, however, regarding which the inferences that seem to follow from these facts needed verification—the question, namely, whether the disappearance of a fauna from the register in the rocks really implies the extinction of that fauna.

Everything really depended upon the answer to that question, and none but an accomplished naturalist could answer it with authority. Fortunately, the most authoritative naturalist of the time, George Cuvier, took the question in hand—not, indeed, with the idea of verifying any suggestion of Smith’s, but in the course of his own original studies—at the very beginning of the century, when Smith’s views were attracting general attention.

 

Cuvier and Smith were exact contemporaries, both men having been born in 1769, that “fertile year”

which gave the world also Chateaubriand, Von Humboldt, Wellington, and Napoleon. But the French naturalist was of very different antecedents from the English surveyor. He was brilliantly educated, had early gained recognition as a scientist, and while yet a young man had come to be known as the foremost comparative anatomist of his time. It was the anatomical studies that led him into the realm of fossils. Some bones dug out of the rocks by workmen in a quarry were brought to his notice, and at once his trained eye told him that they were different from anything he had seen before. Hitherto such bones, when not entirely ignored, had been for the most part ascribed to giants of former days, or even to fallen angels. Cuvier soon showed that neither giants nor angels were in question, but elephants of an unrecognized species. Continuing his studies, particularly with material gathered from gypsum beds near Paris, he had accumulated, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, bones of about twenty-five species of animals that he believed to be different from any now living on the globe.

 

The fame of these studies went abroad, and presently fossil bones poured in from all sides, and Cuvier’s conviction that extinct forms of animals are represented among the fossils was sustained by the evidence of many strange and anomalous forms, some of them of gigantic size. In 1816 the famous