Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/257



N the days when geology was young, now some two hundred years ago, it found a careful foster-mother in theology, who watched over its early growth with anxious solicitude, and stored its receptive mind with the most beautiful stories, which the young science never tired of transforming into curious fancies of its own, which it usually styled "theories of the earth."

Of these, one of the most famous in its day and generation was that of Thomas Burnett, published in 1684, in a work of great learning and eloquence. Samuel Pepys, of diary fame, is said to have found great delight in it, and it is still possible to turn to it with interest when jaded with the more romantic fiction of our own day.

It was the fashion to commence these theories with chaos, and chaos, according to Barnett, was a disorderly mixture of particles of earth, air, and water, floating in space; it was without form, yet not without a center, a center indeed of gravity, toward which the scattered particles began to fall, but the grosser, on account of "their more lumpish nature," fell more quickly than the rest, and reaching the center first accumulated about it in a growing heap, a heap, as we might now express it, of fallen meteorites; the lighter particles, which form fluids, followed the heavier in their descent and collected around the solid kernel to form a deep ocean. This was at first a kind of emulsion, like milk, formed of oily and watery particles commingled, and, just as in the case of milk, there separated on standing a thick, creamy upper layer, which floated on the "skim milk" below. That this really happened, the good Burnett bravely remarks, "we can not doubt." The finest dust of chaos was the last to fall, and it did not descend till the cream had risen; with which it mingled to form, under the heat of the sun, the earth's first crust, an excellent but fragile pastry, consisting of fine earth mixed with a benign juice, which formed a fertile nidus for the origin of living things. Outside nothing now was left but the lightest and most active particles of all, and these "flying ever on the wing, play in the open spaces" about the earth, and constitute the atmosphere of air.

Such was the earth when first it formed the abode of unfallen man—perfect in form and beauty, for it was a true sphere, smooth as an egg; undisfigured by mountains, and unwasted by the sea. It was unfortunately but too like an egg, since its