Page:The evolution of worlds - Lowell.djvu/223

Rh information on, and which, by the sidelights it throws, may help to illuminate the subject.

Thus it certainly is interesting and may to many be a new point of view, that the changes introduced when paleologic times passed into neologic ones were in their fundamental aspects essentially astronomic; which shows how truly astronomic causes are woven into the whole fabric of the Earth. For it was then only, terrestrially speaking, that the year began. The orbital period had existed, of course, from the time the Earth first made the circuit of the Sun. But the year was more a succès d' estime on the Sun's part than one of popular appreciation. As the Sun could not be seen and worked no striking effects upon the Earth, the annual round had no recognizable parts, and one revolution lapsed into the next without demarcation. Only with the clearing of the sky did the seasons come in: to register time by stamping its record on the trees. Before that, summer and winter, spring and autumn, were unknown.

Climate, too, made then its first appearance; climate, named after the sunward obliquity of the Earth, and seeming at times to live down to that characterization. Weather there had been before; pejoratively speaking, nothing but weather. For the downpours in paleologic times must have been exceeded in numbers only by their force. One dull perpetual round of rain was