Chapter 2
Section 2 of Little Masterpieces of Science, The Skies and the Earth. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Little Masterpieces of Science, The Skies and the Earth. Edited by George Isles. Preface
New heavens and a new earth today meet an observer's eye. To our forefathers, skies, land, and sea were held to be little changed from the moment when they left the Master's hand. Today, we learn that the sun and his attendant orbs were once a cloud of slightest texture, a slowest motion, of elements one and the same.
With some account of what the sun can teach us, this volume begins, citing one of the ablest expositors of the nineteenth century, Professor Proctor. The sun, for all his importance to our earth, is but one star amid an uncounted host. In an address by Professor Newcomb, he tells us of the profound questions written across the midnight skies. As we read his pages, we feel a new sense of the grandeur of the universe,
a new reverence for the men who have enlarged its horizons and disentangled its web of law and rule. Of Like Dignity is the essay by Professor Young. with its well-grounded hope that the astronomer is soon to gather and garner harvests as rich as ever yet came to his granary of fact and interpretation. These new harvests will doubtless be mainly won by the camera,
to be created more accurate and sensitive than the instruments of today. Fitly, therefore, a sketch of celestial photography follows the essay by Professor Young. All that the heavens declare is repeated by the rocks as we listen to their story of evolution. In a classic argument here presented,
Sir Charles Lyell maintained that our planet has become what it is by virtue of forces such as make the world at sunset differ by a little from the earth that faced the dawn. He showed that the hills once called eternal are anything but changeless, for their very height has made them the targets of tempest
has delivered them to the dividing axe of frost. A striking object lesson as to the cumulative effect of agencies each in itself trivial enough is the comparison of watercourses from the runlet which succeeds a shower
to the Mississippi sweeping to the sea its spoil from the hills and valleys of half a continent. Here the teacher is one of the first geologists of the age Professor Shaler of Harvard University. A similar discourse of equal pith
is contributed by Professor Huxley, who shows us how the sea carves and sculptures its margins and scatters on its floors the strata which shall duly emerge to air and sunshine. The same great teacher closes the volume
with a chapter on earthquakes and volcanoes, those mighty agents for the arrest or reversal of the gravitation that, unchecked, would carry the continents through river course to the sea, and make the surface of the globe a wilderness of waters.
How nearly does this story of storm and battle touch us all? Here the forces have lifted the backbone of America, which all the storms of ages leave a backbone still. There, in mid-ocean, they bid a Bermuda spring to light and life. Anon, they decree a Sahara, or an Arizonian desert,
where only the cactus may take root, with all the hardiness and much the semblance of its companion, the reptile of the sands. In all this shifting scene were long ago decided the barrenness of the mountain chains, the fertility of plain and prairie, such continuity of riverbed and valley, such shelter for the deep waters of a bay, as predetermined the foundations of New York. George Hiles
End of Section 2 Read by Kevin Crotey Houston, Texas
