WITH OVER 800 ILLUSTRATIONS
OF WHICH ABOUT 40 ARE IN COLOUR

Copyright, 1922
by
G. P. Putnam's Sons

First Printing April, 1922
Second Printing April, 1922
Third Printing April, 1922
Fourth Printing April, 1922
Fifth Printing June, 1922
Sixth Printing June, 1922
Seventh Printing June, 1922
Eighth Printing June, 1922
Ninth Printing August, 1922
Tenth Printing September, 1922
Eleventh Printing Sept., 1922
Twelfth Printing, May, 1924

Made in the United States of America[Pg iii]

By Professor J. Arthur Thomson

Was it not the great philosopher and mathematician Leibnitz who said that the more knowledge advances the more it becomes possible to condense it into little books? Now this "Outline of Science" is certainly not a little book, and yet it illustrates part of the meaning of Leibnitz's wise saying. For here within reasonable compass there is a library of little books—an outline of many sciences.

It will be profitable to the student in proportion to the discrimination with which it is used. For it is not in the least meant to be of the nature of an Encyclopædia, giving condensed and comprehensive articles with a big full stop at the end of each. Nor is it a collection of "primers," beginning at the very beginning of each subject and working methodically onwards. That is not the idea.

What then is the aim of this book? It is to give the intelligent student-citizen, otherwise called "the man in the street," a bunch of intellectual keys by which to open doors which have been hitherto shut to him, partly because he got no glimpse of the treasures behind the doors, and partly because the portals were made forbidding by an unnecessary display of technicalities. Laying aside conventional modes of treatment and seeking rather to open up the subject as one might on a walk with a friend, the work offers the student what might be called informal introductions to the various departments of knowledge. To put it in another way, the articles are meant to be clues which the reader may follow till he has left his starting point very far behind. Perhaps when he has gone far on his own he will not be ungrateful to the simple book of "instructions to travellers" which this[Pg iv] "Outline of Science" is intended to be. The simple "bibliographies" appended to the various articles will be enough to indicate "first books." Each article is meant to be an invitation to an intellectual adventure, and the short lists of books are merely finger-posts for the beginning of the journey.

We confess to being greatly encouraged by the reception that has been given to the English serial issue of "The Outline of Science." It has been very hearty—we might almost say enthusiastic. For we agree with Professor John Dewey, that "the future of our civilisation depends upon the widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind." And we hope that this is what "The Outline of Science" makes for. Information is all to the good; interesting information is better still; but best of all is the education of the scientific habit of mind. Another modern philosopher, Professor L. T. Hobhouse, has declared that the evolutionist's mundane goal is "the mastery by the human mind of the conditions, internal as well as external, of its life and growth." Under the influence of this conviction "The Outline of Science" has been written. For life is not for science, but science for life. And even more than science, to our way of thinking, is the individual development of the scientific way of looking at things. Science is our legacy; we must use it if it is to be our very own.[Pg v]

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There is abundant evidence of a widened and deepened interest in modern science. How could it be otherwise when we think of the magnitude and the eventfulness of recent advances?

But the interest of the general public would be even greater than it is if the makers of new knowledge were more willing to expound their discoveries in ways that could be "understanded of the people." No one objects very much to technicalities in a game or on board a yacht, and they are clearly necessary for terse and precise scientific description. It is certain, however, that they can be reduced to a minimum without sacrificing accuracy, when the object in view is to explain "the gist of the matter." So this Outline of Science is meant for the general reader, who lacks both time and opportunity for special study, and yet would take an intelligent interest in the progress of science which is making the world always new.

The story of the triumphs of modern science is one of which Man may well be proud. Science reads the secret of the distant star and anatomises the atom; foretells the date of the comet's return and predicts the kinds of chickens that will hatch from a dozen eggs; discovers the laws of the wind that bloweth where it listeth and reduces to order the disorder of disease. Science is always setting forth on Columbus voyages, discovering new worlds and conquering them by understanding. For Knowledge means Foresight and Foresight means Power.

The idea of Evolution has influenced all the sciences, forcing us to think of everything as with a history behind it, for we have travelled far since Darwin's day. The solar system, the earth, the mountain ranges, and the great deeps, the rocks and[Pg 4] crystals, the plants and animals, man himself and his social institutions—all must be seen as the outcome of a long process of Becoming. There are some eighty-odd chemical elements on the earth to-day, and it is now much more than a suggestion that these are the outcome of an inorganic evolution, element giving rise to element, going back and back to some primeval stuff, from which they were all originally derived, infinitely long ago. No idea has been so powerful a tool in the fashioning of New Knowledge as this simple but profound idea of Evolution, that the present is the child of the past and the parent of the future. And with the picture of a continuity of evolution from nebula to social systems comes a promise of an increasing control—a promise that Man will become not only a more accurate student, but a more complete master of his world.

It is characteristic of modern science that the whole world is seen to be more vital than before. Everywhere there has been a passage from the static to the dynamic. Thus the new revelations of the constitution of matter, which we owe to the discoveries of men like Professor Sir J. J. Thomson, Professor Sir Ernest Rutherford, and Professor Frederick Soddy, have shown the very dust to have a complexity and an activity heretofore unimagined. Such phrases as "dead" matter and "inert" matter have gone by the board.

The new theory of the atom amounts almost to a new conception of the universe. It bids fair to reveal to us many of nature's hidden secrets. The atom is no longer the indivisible particle of matter it was once understood to be. We know now that there is an atom within the atom—that what we thought was elementary can be dissociated and broken up. The present-day theories of the atom and the constitution of matter are the outcome of the comparatively recent discovery of such things as radium, the X-rays, and the wonderful revelations of such instruments as the spectroscope and other highly perfected scientific instruments.

The advent of the electron theory has thrown a flood of light on what before was hidden or only dimly guessed at. It has given us a new conception of the framework of the universe. We are beginning to know and realise of what matter is made[Pg 5] and what electric phenomena mean. We can glimpse the vast stores of energy locked up in matter. The new knowledge has much to tell us about the origin and phenomena, not only of our own planet, but other planets, of the stars, and the sun. New light is thrown on the source of the sun's heat; we can make more than guesses as to its probable age. The great question to-day is: is there one primordial substance from which all the varying forms of matter have been evolved?

But the discovery of electrons is only one of the revolutionary changes which give modern science an entrancing interest.

As in chemistry and physics, so in the science of living creatures there have been recent advances that have changed the whole prospect. A good instance is afforded by the discovery of the "hormones," or chemical messengers, which are produced by ductless glands, such as the thyroid, the supra-renal, and the pituitary, and are distributed throughout the body by the blood. The work of physiologists like Professor Starling and Professor Bayliss has shown that these chemical messengers regulate what may be called the "pace" of the body, and bring about that regulated harmony and smoothness of working which we know as health. It is not too much to say that the discovery of hormones has changed the whole of physiology. Our knowledge of the human body far surpasses that of the past generation.

The persistent patience of microscopists and technical improvements like the "ultramicroscope" have greatly increased our knowledge of the invisible world of life. To the bacteria of a past generation have been added a multitude of microscopic animal microbes, such as that which causes Sleeping Sickness. The life-histories and the weird ways of many important parasites have been unravelled; and here again knowledge means mastery. To a degree which has almost surpassed expectations there has been a revelation of the intricacy of the stones and mortar of the house of life, and the microscopic study of germ-cells has wonderfully supplemented the epoch-making experimental study of heredity which began with Mendel. It goes without saying that no one can call himself educated who does not understand the central and simple ideas of Mendelism and other new departures in biology.[Pg 6]

The procession of life through the ages and the factors in the sublime movement; the peopling of the earth by plants and animals and the linking of life to life in subtle inter-relations, such as those between flowers and their insect-visitors; the life-histories of individual types and the extraordinary results of the new inquiry called "experimental embryology"—these also are among the subjects with which this Outline will deal.

The behaviour of animals is another fascinating study, leading to a provisional picture of the dawn of mind. Indeed, no branch of science surpasses in interest that which deals with the ways and habits—the truly wonderful devices, adaptations, and instincts—of insects, birds, and mammals. We no longer deny a degree of intelligence to some members of the animal world—even the line between intelligence and reason is sometimes difficult to find.

Fresh contacts between physiology and the study of man's mental life; precise studies of the ways of children and wild peoples; and new methods like those of the psycho-analyst must also receive the attention they deserve, for they are giving us a "New Psychology" and the claims of psychical research must also be recognised by the open-minded.

The general aim of the Outline is to give the reader a clear and concise view of the essentials of present-day science, so that he may follow with intelligence the modern advance and share appreciatively in man's continued conquest of his kingdom.

J. Arthur Thomson.[Pg 7]

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The story of the triumphs of modern science naturally opens with Astronomy. The picture of the Universe which the astronomer offers to us is imperfect; the lines he traces are often faint and uncertain. There are many problems which have been solved, there are just as many about which there is doubt, and notwithstanding our great increase in knowledge, there remain just as many which are entirely unsolved.

The heavenly bodies fall into two very distinct classes so far as their relation to our Earth is concerned; the one class, a very small one, comprises a sort of colony of which the Earth is a member. These bodies are called planets, or wanderers. There are eight of them, including the Earth, and they all circle round the sun. Their names, in the order of their distance from the sun, are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and of these Mercury, the nearest to the sun, is rarely seen by the naked eye. Uranus is practically invisible, and Neptune quite so. These eight planets, together with the sun, constitute, as we have said, a sort of little colony; this colony is called the Solar System.

The second class of heavenly bodies are those which lie outside the solar system. Every one of those glittering points we see on a starlit night is at an immensely greater distance from us than is any member of the Solar System. Yet the members of this little colony of ours, judged by terrestrial standards, are at enormous distances from one another. If a shell were shot in a straight line from one side of Neptune's orbit to the other it would take five hundred years to complete its journey. Yet this distance, the greatest in the Solar System as now known (excepting the far swing of some of the comets), is insignificant compared to the distances of the stars. One of the nearest stars to the earth that we know of is Alpha Centauri, estimated to be some twenty-five million millions of miles away. Sirius, the brightest star in the firmament, is double this distance from the earth.

We must imagine the colony of planets to which we belong as a compact little family swimming in an immense void. At distances which would take our shell, not hundreds, but millions[Pg 11] of years to traverse, we reach the stars—or rather, a star, for the distances between stars are as great as the distance between the nearest of them and our Sun. The Earth, the planet on which we live, is a mighty globe bounded by a crust of rock many miles in thickness; the great volumes of water which we call our oceans lie in the deeper hollows of the crust. Above the surface an ocean of invisible gas, the atmosphere, rises to a height of about three hundred miles, getting thinner and thinner as it ascends.

Except when the winds rise to a high speed, we seem to live in a very tranquil world. At night, when the glare of the sun passes out of our atmosphere, the stars and planets seem to move across the heavens with a stately and solemn slowness. It was one of the first discoveries of modern astronomy that this movement is only apparent. The apparent creeping of the stars across the heavens at night is accounted for by the fact that the earth turns upon its axis once in every twenty-four hours. When we remember the size of the earth we see that this implies a prodigious speed.

In addition to this the earth revolves round the sun at a speed of more than a thousand miles a minute. Its path round the sun, year in year out, measures about 580,000,000 miles. The earth is held closely to this path by the gravitational pull of the sun, which has a mass 333,432 times that of the earth. If at any moment the sun ceased to exert this pull the earth would instantly fly off into space straight in the direction in which it was moving at the time, that is to say, at a tangent. This tendency to fly off at a tangent is continuous. It is the balance between it and the sun's pull which keeps the earth to her almost circular orbit. In the same way the seven other planets are held to their orbits.

Circling round the earth, in the same way as the earth circles round the sun, is our moon. Sometimes the moon passes directly between us and the sun, and cuts off the light from us.[Pg 12] We then have a total or partial eclipse of the sun. At other times the earth passes directly between the sun and the moon, and causes an eclipse of the moon. The great ball of the earth naturally trails a mighty shadow across space, and the moon is "eclipsed" when it passes into this.

The other seven planets, five of which have moons of their own, circle round the sun as the earth does. The sun's mass is immensely larger than that of all the planets put together, and all of them would be drawn into it and perish if they did not travel rapidly round it in gigantic orbits. So the eight planets, spinning round on their axes, follow their fixed paths round the sun. The planets are secondary bodies, but they are most important, because they are the only globes in which there can be life, as we know life.

If we could be transported in some magical way to an immense distance in space above the sun, we should see our Solar System as it is drawn in the accompanying diagram (Fig. 1), except that the planets would be mere specks, faintly visible in the light which they receive from the sun. (This diagram is drawn approximately to scale.) If we moved still farther away, trillions of miles away, the planets would fade entirely out of view, and the sun would shrink into a point of fire, a star. And here you begin to realize the nature of the universe. The sun is a star. The stars are suns. Our sun looks big simply because of its comparative nearness to us. The universe is a stupendous collection of millions of stars or suns, many of which may have planetary families like ours.

How many stars are there? A glance at a photograph of star-clouds will tell at once that it is quite impossible to count them. The fine photograph reproduced in Figure 2 represents[Pg 13] a very small patch of that pale-white belt, the Milky Way, which spans the sky at night. It is true that this is a particularly rich area of the Milky Way, but the entire belt of light has been resolved in this way into masses or clouds of stars. Astronomers have counted the stars in typical districts here and there, and from these partial counts we get some idea of the total number of stars. There are estimated to be between two and three thousand million stars.

Yet these stars are separated by inconceivable distances from each other, and it is one of the greatest triumphs of modern astronomy to have mastered, so far, the scale of the universe. For several centuries astronomers have known the relative distances from each other of the sun and the planets. If they could discover the actual distance of any one planet from any other, they could at once tell all the distances within the Solar System.

The sun is, on the latest measurements, at an average distance of 92,830,000 miles from the earth, for as the orbit of the earth is not a true circle, this distance varies. This means that in six months from now the earth will be right at the opposite side of its path round the sun, or 185,000,000 miles away from where it is now. Viewed or photographed from two positions so wide apart, the nearest stars show a tiny "shift" against the background of the most distant stars, and that is enough for the mathematician. He can calculate the distance of any star near enough to show this "shift." We have found that the nearest star to the earth, a recently discovered star, is twenty-five trillion miles away. Only thirty stars are known to be within a hundred trillion miles of us.

This way of measuring does not, however, take us very far away in the heavens. There are only a few hundred stars within five hundred trillion miles of the earth, and at that distance the "shift" of a star against the background (parallax, the astronomer calls it) is so minute that figures are very uncertain. At this point the astronomer takes up a new method. He learns the[Pg 14] different types of stars, and then he is able to deduce more or less accurately the distance of a star of a known type from its faintness. He, of course, has instruments for gauging their light. As a result of twenty years work in this field, it is now known that the more distant stars of the Milky Way are at least a hundred thousand trillion (100,000,000,000,000,000) miles away from the sun.

Our sun is in a more or less central region of the universe, or a few hundred trillion miles from the actual centre. The remainder of the stars, which are all outside our Solar System, are spread out, apparently, in an enormous disc-like collection, so vast that even a ray of light, which travels at the rate of 186,000 miles a second, would take 50,000 years to travel from one end of it to the other. This, then is what we call our universe.

Why do we say "our universe"? Why not the universe? It is now believed by many of our most distinguished astronomers that our colossal family of stars is only one of many universes. By a universe an astronomer means any collection of stars which are close enough to control each other's movements by gravitation; and it is clear that there might be many universes, in this sense, separated from each other by profound abysses of space. Probably there are.

For a long time we have been familiar with certain strange objects in the heavens which are called "spiral nebulæ" (Fig 4). We shall see at a later stage what a nebula is, and we shall see that some astronomers regard these spiral nebulæ as worlds "in the making." But some of the most eminent astronomers believe that they are separate universes—"island-universes" they call them—or great collections of millions of stars like our universe. There are certain peculiarities in the structure of the Milky Way which lead these astronomers to think that our universe may be[Pg 15] a spiral nebula, and that the other spiral nebulæ are "other universes."

Vast as is the Solar System, then, it is excessively minute in comparison with the Stellar System, the universe of the Stars, which is on a scale far transcending anything the human mind can apprehend.

But now let us turn to the Solar System, and consider the members of our own little colony.

Within the Solar System there are a large number of problems that interest us. What is the size, mass, and distance of each of the planets? What satellites, like our Moon, do they possess? What are their temperatures? And those other, sporadic members of our system, comets and meteors, what are they? What are their movements? How do they originate? And the Sun itself, what is its composition, what is the source of its heat, how did it originate? Is it running down?

These last questions introduce us to a branch of astronomy which is concerned with the physical constitution of the stars, a study which, not so very many years ago, may well have appeared inconceivable. But the spectroscope enables us to answer even these questions, and the answer opens up questions of yet greater interest. We find that the stars can be arranged in an order of development—that there are stars at all stages of their life-history. The main lines of the evolution of the stellar universe can be worked out. In the sun and stars we have furnaces with temperatures enormously high; it is in such conditions that substances are resolved into their simplest forms, and it is thus we are enabled to obtain a knowledge of the most primitive forms of matter. It is in this direction that the spectroscope[Pg 16] (which we shall refer to immediately) has helped us so much. It is to this wonderful instrument that we owe our knowledge of the composition of the sun and stars, as we shall see.

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Such are some of the questions with which modern astronomy deals. To answer them requires the employment of instruments of almost incredible refinement and exactitude and also the full resources of mathematical genius. Whether astronomy be judged from the point of view of the phenomena studied, the vast masses, the immense distances, the æons of time, or whether it be judged as a monument of human ingenuity, patience, and the rarest type of genius, it is certainly one of the grandest, as it is also one of the oldest, of the sciences.

In the Solar System we include all those bodies dependent on the sun which circulate round it at various distances, deriving their light and heat from the sun—the planets and their moons, certain comets and a multitude of meteors: in other words, all bodies whose movements in space are determined by the gravitational pull of the sun.

Thanks to our wonderful modern instruments and the ingenious methods used by astronomers, we have to-day a remarkable knowledge of the sun.

Look at the figure of the sun in the frontispiece. The picture represents an eclipse of the sun; the dark body of the moon has screened the sun's shining disc and taken the glare out of our eyes; we see a silvery halo surrounding the great orb on every side. It is the sun's atmosphere, or "crown" (corona), stretching for millions of miles into space in the form of a soft silvery-looking light; probably much of its light is sunlight reflected from particles of dust, although the spectroscope shows an element in the corona that has not so far been detected anywhere else in the universe and which in consequence has been named Coronium.

We next notice in the illustration that at the base of the halo there are red flames peeping out from the edges of the hidden disc. When one remembers that the sun is 866,000 miles in diameter, one hardly needs to be told that these flames are really gigantic. We shall see what they are presently.

The astronomer has divided the sun into definite concentric regions or layers. These layers envelop the nucleus or central body of the sun somewhat as the atmosphere envelops our earth. It is through these vapour layers that the bright white body of the sun is seen. Of the innermost region, the heart or nucleus of the sun, we know almost nothing. The central body or nucleus is surrounded by a brilliantly luminous envelope or layer of vaporous matter which is what we see when we look at the sun and which the astronomer calls the photosphere.

Above—that is, overlying—the photosphere there is a second layer of glowing gases, which is known as the reversing layer. This layer is cooler than the underlying photosphere; it forms a veil of smoke-like haze and is of from 500 to 1,000 miles in thickness.

A third layer or envelope immediately lying over the last one is the region known as the chromosphere. The chromosphere extends from 5,000 to 10,000 miles in thickness—a "sea" of red tumultuous surging fire. Chief among the glowing gases is the vapour of hydrogen. The intense white heat of the photosphere beneath shines through this layer, overpowering its brilliant redness. From the uppermost portion of the chromosphere great fiery tongues of glowing hydrogen and calcium vapour shoot out for many thousands of miles, driven outward by some prodigious expulsive force. It is these red "prominences" which are such a notable feature in the picture of the eclipse of the sun already referred to.

During the solar eclipse of 1919 one of these red flames rose in less than seven hours from a height of 130,000 miles to more than 500,000 miles above the sun's surface. This immense column of red-hot gas, four or five times the thickness of the earth, was soaring upward at the rate of 60,000 miles an hour.

These flaming jets or prominences shooting out from the chromosphere are not to be seen every day by the naked eye; the dazzling light of the sun obscures them, gigantic as they are. They can be observed, however, by the spectroscope any day, and they are visible to us for a very short time during an eclipse of the sun. Some extraordinary outbursts have been witnessed. Thus the late Professor Young described one on September 7, 1871, when he had been examining a prominence by the spectroscope:

The fourth and uppermost layer or region is that of the corona, of immense extent and fading away into the surrounding sky—this we have already referred to. The diagram (Fig. 5) shows the dispositions of these various layers of the sun. It is through these several transparent layers that we see the white light body of the sun.

Here let us return to and see what more we know about the photosphere—the sun's surface. It is from the photosphere that we have gained most of our knowledge of the composition of the sun, which is believed not to be a solid body. Examination of the photosphere shows that the outer surface is never at rest. Small bright cloudlets come and go in rapid succession, giving the surface, through contrasts in luminosity, a granular appearance. Of course, to be visible at all at 92,830,000 miles the cloudlets cannot be small. They imply enormous activity in the photosphere. If we might speak picturesquely the sun's surface resembles a boiling ocean of white-hot metal vapours. We have to-day a wonderful instrument, which will be described later, which dilutes, as it were, the general glare of the sun, and enables us to observe these fiery eruptions at any hour. The "oceans" of red-hot gas and white-hot metal vapour at the sun's surface are constantly driven by great storms. Some unimaginable energy streams out from the body or muscles of the sun and blows its outer layers into gigantic shreds, as it were.[Pg 20]

The actual temperature at the sun's surface, or what appears to us to be the surface—the photosphere—is, of course, unknown, but careful calculation suggests that it is from 5,000° C. to 7,000° C. The interior is vastly hotter. We can form no conception of such temperatures as must exist there. Not even the most obdurate solid could resist such temperatures, but would be converted almost instantaneously into gas. But it would not be gas as we know gases on the earth. The enormous pressures that exist on the sun must convert even gases into thick treacly fluids. We can only infer this state of matter. It is beyond our power to reproduce it.

It is in the brilliant photosphere that the dark areas known as sun-spots appear. Some of these dark spots—they are dark only by contrast with the photosphere surrounding them—are of enormous size, covering many thousands of square miles of surface. What they are we cannot positively say. They look like great cavities in the sun's surface. Some think they are giant whirlpools. Certainly they seem to be great whirling streams of glowing gases with vapours above them and immense upward and downward currents within them. Round the edges of the sun-spots rise great tongues of flame.

Perhaps the most popularly known fact about sun-spots is that they are somehow connected with what we call magnetic storms on earth. These magnetic storms manifest themselves in interruptions of our telegraphic and telephonic communications, in violent disturbances of the mariner's compass, and in exceptional auroral displays. The connection between the two sets of phenomena cannot be doubted, even although at times there may be a great spot on the sun without any corresponding "magnetic storm" effects on the earth.

A surprising fact about sun-spots is that they show definite periodic variations in number. The best-defined period is one of[Pg 21] about eleven years. During this period the spots increase to a maximum in number and then diminish to a minimum, the variation being more or less regular. Now this can only mean one thing. To be periodic the spots must have some deep-seated connection with the fundamental facts of the sun's structure and activities. Looked at from this point of view their importance becomes great.

The aurora borealis is one of the most beautiful spectacles in the sky. The colours and shape change every instant; sometimes a fan-like cluster of rays, at other times long golden draperies gliding one over the other. Blue, green, yellow, red, and white combine to give a glorious display of colour. The theory of its origin is still, in part, obscure, but there can be no doubt that the aurora is related to the magnetic phenomena of the earth and therefore is connected with the electrical influence of the sun.]

It is from the study of sun-spots that we have learned that the sun's surface does not appear to rotate all at the same speed. The "equatorial" regions are rotating quicker than regions farther north or south. A point forty-five degrees from the equator seems to take about two and a half days longer to complete one rotation than a point on the equator. This, of course, confirms our belief that the sun cannot be a solid body.

What is its composition? We know that there are present, in a gaseous state, such well-known elements as sodium, iron, copper, zinc, and magnesium; indeed, we know that there is practically every element in the sun that we know to be in the earth. How do we know?

It is from the photosphere, as has been said, that we have won most of our knowledge of the sun. The instrument used for this purpose is the spectroscope; and before proceeding to deal further with the sun and the source of its energy it will be better to describe this instrument.

The spectroscope is an instrument for analysing light. So important is it in the revelations it has given us that it will be best to describe it fully. Every substance to be examined must first be made to glow, made luminous; and as nearly everything in the heavens is luminous the instrument has a great range in Astronomy. And when we speak of analysing light, we mean that[Pg 22] the light may be broken up into waves of different lengths. What we call light is a series of minute waves in ether, and these waves are—measuring them from crest to crest, so to say—of various lengths. Each wave-length corresponds to a colour of the rainbow. The shortest waves give us a sensation of violet colour, and the largest waves cause a sensation of red. The rainbow, in fact, is a sort of natural spectrum. (The meaning of the rainbow is that the moisture-laden air has sorted out these waves, in the sun's light, according to their length.) Now the simplest form of spectroscope is a glass prism—a triangular-shaped piece of glass. If white light (sunlight, for example) passes through a glass prism, we see a series of rainbow-tinted colours. Anyone can notice this effect when sunlight is shining through any kind of cut glass—the stopper of a wine decanter, for instance. If, instead of catching with the eye the coloured lights as they emerge from the glass prism, we allow them to fall on a screen, we shall find that they pass, by continuous gradations, from red at the one end of the screen, through orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo, to violet at the other end. In other words, what we call white light is composed of rays of these several colours. They go to make up the effect which we call white. And now just as water can be split up into its two elements, oxygen and hydrogen, so sunlight can be broken up into its primary colours, which are those we have just mentioned.

This range of colours, produced by the spectroscope, we call the solar spectrum, and these are, from the spectroscopic point of view, primary colours. Each shade of colour has its definite position in the spectrum. That is to say, the light of each shade of colour (corresponding to its wave-length) is reflected through a certain fixed angle on passing through the glass prism. Every possible kind of light has its definite position, and is denoted by a number which gives the wave-length of the vibrations constituting that particular kind of light.

Now, other kinds of light besides sunlight can be analysed.[Pg 23] Light from any substance which has been made incandescent may be observed with the spectroscope in the same way, and each element can be thus separated. It is found that each substance (in the same conditions of pressure, etc.) gives a constant spectrum of its own. Each metal displays its own distinctive colour. It is obvious, therefore, that the spectrum provides the means for identifying a particular substance. It was by this method that we discovered in the sun the presence of such well-known elements as sodium, iron, copper, zinc, and magnesium.

Every chemical element known, then, has a distinctive spectrum of its own when it is raised to incandescence, and this distinctive spectrum is as reliable a means of identification for the element as a human face is for its owner. Whether it is a substance glowing in the laboratory or in a remote star makes no difference to the spectroscope; if the light of any substance reaches it, that substance will be recognised and identified by the characteristic set of waves.

The spectrum of a glowing mass of gas will consist in a number of bright lines of various colours, and at various intervals; corresponding to each kind of gas, there will be a peculiar and distinctive arrangement of bright lines. But if the light from such a mass of glowing gas be made to pass through a cool mass of the same gas it will be found that dark lines replace the bright lines in the spectrum, the reason for this being that the cool gas absorbs the rays of light emitted by the hot gas. Experiments of this kind enable us to reach the important general statement that every gas, when cold, absorbs the same rays of light which it emits when hot.

Crossing the solar spectrum are hundreds and hundreds of dark lines. These could not at first be explained, because this fact of discriminative absorption was not known. We understand now. The sun's white light comes from the photosphere, but between us and the photosphere there is, as we have seen, another solar envelope of relatively cooler vapours—the reversing[Pg 24] layer. Each constituent element in this outer envelope stops its own kind of light, that is, the kind of light made by incandescent atoms of the same element in the photosphere. The "stoppages" register themselves in the solar spectrum as dark lines placed exactly where the corresponding bright lines would have been. The explanation once attained, dark lines became as significant as bright lines. The secret of the sun's composition was out. We have found practically every element in the sun that we know to be in the earth. We have identified an element in the sun before we were able to isolate it on the earth. We have been able even to point to the coolest places on the sun, the centres of sun-spots, where alone the temperature seems to have fallen sufficiently low to allow chemical compounds to form.

It is thus we have been able to determine what the stars, comets, or nebulæ are made of.

In 1868 Sir Norman Lockyer detected a light coming from the prominences of the sun which was not given by any substance known on earth, and attributed this to an unknown gas which he called helium, from the Greek helios, the sun. In 1895 Sir William Ramsay discovered in certain minerals the same gas identified by the spectroscope. We can say, therefore, that this gas was discovered in the sun nearly thirty years before it was found on earth; this discovery of the long-lost heir is as thrilling a chapter in the detective story of science as any in the sensational stories of the day, and makes us feel quite certain that our methods really tell us of what elements sun and stars are built up. The light from the corona of the sun, as we have mentioned indicates a gas still unknown on earth, which has been christened Coronium.

But this is not all; soon a new use was found for the spectroscope. We found that we could measure with it the most difficult[Pg 25] of all speeds to measure, speed in the line of sight. Movement at right angles to the direction in which one is looking is, if there is sufficient of it, easy to detect, and, if the distance of the moving body is known, easy to measure. But movement in the line of vision is both difficult to detect and difficult to measure. Yet, even at the enormous distances with which astronomers have to deal, the spectroscope can detect such movement and furnish data for its measurement. If a luminous body containing, say, sodium is moving rapidly towards the spectroscope, it will be found that the sodium lines in the spectrum have moved slightly from their usual definite positions towards the violet end of the spectrum, the amount of the change of position increasing with the speed of the luminous body. If the body is moving away from the spectroscope the shifting of the spectral lines will be in the opposite direction, towards the red end of the spectrum. In this way we have discovered and measured movements that otherwise would probably not have revealed themselves unmistakably to us for thousands of years. In the same way we have watched, and measured the speed of, tremendous movements on the sun, and so gained proof that the vast disturbances we should expect there actually do occur.

Now let us return to our consideration of the sun.

To us on the earth the most patent and most astonishing fact about the sun is its tremendous energy. Heat and light in amazing quantities pour from it without ceasing.

Where does this energy come from? Enormous jets of red glowing gases can be seen shooting outwards from the sun, like flames from a fire, for thousands of miles. Does this argue fire, as we know fire on the earth? On this point the scientist is sure. The sun is not burning, and combustion is not the source of its[Pg 26] heat. Combustion is a chemical reaction between atoms. The conditions that make it possible are known and the results are predictable and measurable. But no chemical reaction of the nature of combustion as we know it will explain the sun's energy, nor indeed will any ordinary chemical reaction of any kind. If the sun were composed of combustible material throughout and the conditions of combustion as we understand them were always present, the sun would burn itself out in some thousands of years, with marked changes in its heat and light production as the process advanced. There is no evidence of such changes. There is, instead, strong evidence that the sun has been emitting light and heat in prodigious quantities, not for thousands, but for millions of years. Every addition to our knowledge that throws light on the sun's age seems to make for increase rather than decrease of its years. This makes the wonder of its energy greater.

And we cannot avoid the issue of the source of the energy by saying merely that the sun is gradually radiating away an energy that originated in some unknown manner, away back at the beginning of things. Reliable calculations show that the years required for the mere cooling of a globe like the sun could not possibly run to millions. In other words, the sun's energy must be subject to continuous and more or less steady renewal. However it may have acquired its enormous energy in the past, it must have some source of energy in the present.

The best explanation that we have to-day of this continuous accretion of energy is that it is due to shrinkage of the sun's bulk under the force of gravity. Gravity is one of the most mysterious forces of nature, but it is an obvious fact that bodies behave as if they attracted one another, and Newton worked out the law of this attraction. We may say, without trying to go too deeply into things, that every particle of matter attracts every other throughout the universe. If the diameter of the sun were to shrink by one mile all round, this would mean that all the millions of tons in the[Pg 27] outer one-mile thickness would have a straight drop of one mile towards the centre. And that is not all, because obviously the layers below this outer mile would also drop inwards, each to a less degree than the one above it. What a tremendous movement of matter, however slowly it might take place! And what a tremendous energy would be involved! Astronomers calculate that the above shrinkage of one mile all round would require fifty years for its completion, assuming, reasonably, that there is close and continuous relationship between loss of heat by radiation and shrinkage. Even if this were true we need not feel over-anxious on this theory; before the sun became too cold to support life many millions of years would be required.

It was suggested at one time that falls of meteoric matter into the sun would account for the sun's heat. This position is hardly tenable now. The mere bulk of the meteoric matter required by the hypothesis, apart from other reasons, is against it. There is undoubtedly an enormous amount of meteoric matter moving about within the bounds of the solar system, but most of it seems to be following definite routes round the sun like the planets. The stray erratic quantities destined to meet their doom by collision with the sun can hardly be sufficient to account for the sun's heat.

Recent study of radio-active bodies has suggested another factor that may be working powerfully along with the force of gravitation to maintain the sun's store of heat. In radio-active bodies certain atoms seem to be undergoing disintegration. These atoms appear to be splitting up into very minute and primitive constituents. But since matter may be split up into such constituents, may it not be built up from them?

The question is whether these "radio-active" elements are undergoing disintegration, or formation, in the sun. If they are undergoing disintegration—and the sun itself is undoubtedly radio-active—then we have another source of heat for the sun that will last indefinitely.[Pg 28]

It is quite clear that there cannot be life on the stars. Nothing solid or even liquid can exist in such furnaces as they are. Life exists only on planets, and even on these its possibilities are limited. Whether all the stars, or how many of them, have planetary families like our sun, we cannot positively say. If they have, such planets would be too faint and small to be visible tens of trillions of miles away. Some astronomers think that our sun may be exceptional in having planets, but their reasons are speculative and unconvincing. Probably a large proportion at least of the stars have planets, and we may therefore survey the globes of our own solar system and in a general way extend the results to the rest of the universe.

In considering the possibility of life as we know it we may at once rule out the most distant planets from the sun, Uranus and Neptune. They are probably intrinsically too hot. We may also pass over the nearest planet to the sun, Mercury. We have reason to believe that it turns on its axis in the same period as it revolves round the sun, and it must therefore always present the same side to the sun. This means that the heat on the sunlit side of Mercury is above boiling-point, while the cold on the other side must be between two and three hundred degrees below freezing-point.

The planet Venus, the bright globe which is known to all as the morning and evening "star," seems at first sight more promising as regards the possibility of life. It is of nearly the same size as the earth, and it has a good atmosphere, but there are many astronomers who believe that, like Mercury, it always presents the same face to the sun, and it would therefore have the same disadvantage—a broiling heat on the sunny side and the cold of[Pg 29] space on the opposite side. We are not sure. The surface of Venus is so bright—the light of the sun is reflected to us by such dense masses of cloud and dust—that it is difficult to trace any permanent markings on it, and thus ascertain how long it takes to rotate on its axis. Many astronomers believe that they have succeeded, and that the planet always turns the same face to the sun. If it does, we can hardly conceive of life on its surface, in spite of the cloud-screen.

We turn to Mars; and we must first make it clear why there is so much speculation about life on Mars, and why it is supposed that, if there is life on Mars, it must be more advanced than life on the earth.

The basis of this belief is that if, as we saw, all the globes in our solar system are masses of metal that are cooling down, the smaller will have cooled down before the larger, and will be further ahead in their development. Now Mars is very much smaller than the earth, and must have cooled at its surface millions of years before the earth did. Hence, if a story of life began on Mars at all, it began long before the story of life on the earth. We cannot guess what sort of life-forms would be evolved in a different world, but we can confidently say that they would tend toward increasing intelligence; and thus we are disposed to look for highly intelligent beings on Mars.

But this argument supposes that the conditions of life, namely air and water, are found on Mars, and it is disputed whether they are found there in sufficient quantity. The late Professor Percival Lowell, who made a lifelong study of Mars, maintained that there are hundreds of straight lines drawn across the surface of the planet, and he claimed that they are beds of vegetation marking the sites of great channels or pipes by means of which the "Martians" draw water from their polar ocean. Professor[Pg 30] W. H. Pickering, another high authority, thinks that the lines are long, narrow marshes fed by moist winds from the poles. There are certainly white polar caps on Mars. They seem to melt in the spring, and the dark fringe round them grows broader.

Other astronomers, however, say that they find no trace of water-vapour in the atmosphere of Mars, and they think that the polar caps may be simply thin sheets of hoar-frost or frozen gas. They point out that, as the atmosphere of Mars is certainly scanty, and the distance from the sun is so great, it may be too cold for the fluid water to exist on the planet.

If one asks why our wonderful instruments cannot settle these points, one must be reminded that Mars is never nearer than 34,000,000 miles from the earth, and only approaches to this distance once in fifteen or seventeen years. The image of Mars on the photographic negative taken in a big telescope is very small. Astronomers rely to a great extent on the eye, which is more sensitive than the photographic plate. But it is easy to have differences of opinion as to what the eye sees, and so there is a good deal of controversy.

In August, 1924, the planet will again be well placed for observation, and we may learn more about it. Already a few of the much-disputed lines, which people wrongly call "canals," have been traced on photographs. Astronomers who are sceptical about life on Mars are often not fully aware of the extraordinary adaptability of life. There was a time when the climate of the whole earth, from pole to pole, was semi-tropical for millions of years. No animal could then endure the least cold, yet now we have plenty of Arctic plants and animals. If the cold came slowly on Mars, as we have reason to suppose, the population could be gradually adapted to it. On the whole, it is possible that there is advanced life on Mars, and it is not impossible, in spite of the very great difficulties of a code of communication, that our "elder brothers" may yet flash across space the solution of many of our problems.[Pg 31]

Next to Mars, going outward from the sun, is Jupiter. Between Mars and Jupiter, however, there are more than three hundred million miles of space, and the older astronomers wondered why this was not occupied by a planet. We now know that it contains about nine hundred "planetoids," or small globes of from five to five hundred miles in diameter. It was at one time thought that a planet might have burst into these fragments (a theory which is not mathematically satisfactory), or it may be that the material which is scattered in them was prevented by the nearness of the great bulk of Jupiter from uniting into one globe.

For Jupiter is a giant planet, and its gravitational influence must extend far over space. It is 1,300 times as large as the earth, and has nine moons, four of which are large, in attendance on it. It is interesting to note that the outermost moons of Jupiter and Saturn revolve round these planets in a direction contrary to the usual direction taken by moons round planets, and by planets round the sun. But there is no life on Jupiter.

The surface which we see in photographs (Fig. 12) is a mass of cloud or steam which always envelops the body of the planet. It is apparently red-hot. A red tinge is seen sometimes at the edges of its cloud-belts, and a large red region (the "red spot"), 23,000 miles in length, has been visible on it for half a century. There may be a liquid or solid core to the planet, but as a whole it is a mass of seething vapours whirling round on its axis once in every ten hours. As in the case of the sun, however, different latitudes appear to rotate at different rates. The interior of Jupiter is very hot, but the planet is not self-luminous. The planets Venus and Jupiter shine very brightly, but they have no light of their own; they reflect the sunlight.

Saturn is in the same interesting condition. The surface in the photograph (Fig. 13) is steam, and Saturn is so far away[Pg 32] from the sun that the vaporisation of its oceans must necessarily be due to its own internal heat. It is too hot for water to settle on its surface. Like Jupiter, the great globe turns on its axis once in ten hours—a prodigious speed—and must be a swirling, seething mass of metallic vapours and gases. It is instructive to compare Jupiter and Saturn in this respect with the sun. They are smaller globes and have cooled down more than the central fire.

Saturn is a beautiful object in the telescope because it has ten moons (to include one which is disputed) and a wonderful system of "rings" round it. The so-called rings are a mighty swarm of meteorites—pieces of iron and stone of all sorts and sizes, which reflect the light of the sun to us. This ocean of matter is some miles deep, and stretches from a few thousand miles from the surface of the planet to 172,000 miles out in space. Some astronomers think that this is volcanic material which has been shot out of the planet. Others regard it as stuff which would have combined to form an eleventh moon but was prevented by the nearness of Saturn itself. There is no evidence of life on Saturn.

Mars and Venus are therefore the only planets, besides the earth, on which we may look for life; and in the case of Venus, the possibility is very faint. But what about the moons which attend the planets? They range in size from the little ten-miles-wide moons of Mars, to Titan, a moon of Saturn, and Ganymede, a satellite of Jupiter, which are about 3,000 miles in diameter. May there not be life on some of the larger of these moons? We will take our own moon as a type of the class.

The moon is so very much nearer to us than any other heavenly body that we have a remarkable knowledge of it. In Fig. 14 you have a photograph, taken in one of our largest telescopes,[Pg 33] of part of its surface. In a sense such a telescope brings the moon to within about fifty miles of us. We should see a city like London as a dark, sprawling blotch on the globe. We could just detect a Zeppelin or a Diplodocus as a moving speck against the surface. But we find none of these things. It is true that a few astronomers believe that they see signs of some sort of feeble life or movement on the moon. Professor Pickering thinks that he can trace some volcanic activity. He believes that there are areas of vegetation, probably of a low order, and that the soil of the moon may retain a certain amount of water in it. He speaks of a very thin atmosphere, and of occasional light falls of snow. He has succeeded in persuading some careful observers that there probably are slight changes of some kind taking place on the moon.

But there are many things that point to absence of air on the moon. Even the photographs we reproduce tell the same story. The edges of the shadows are all hard and black. If there had been an appreciable atmosphere it would have scattered the sun's light on to the edges and produced a gradual shading off such as we see on the earth. This relative absence of air must give rise to some surprising effects. There will be no sounds on the moon, because sounds are merely air waves. Even a meteor shattering itself to a violent end against the surface of the moon would make no noise. Nor would it herald its coming by glowing into a "shooting star," as it would on entering the earth's atmosphere. There will be no floating dust, no scent, no twilight, no blue sky, no twinkling of the stars. The sky will be always black and the stars will be clearly visible by day as by night. The sun's wonderful corona, which no man on earth, even by seizing every opportunity during eclipses, can hope to see for more than two hours in all in a long lifetime, will be visible all day. So will the great red flames of the sun. Of course, there will be no life, and no landscape effects and scenery effects due to vegetation.

The moon takes approximately twenty-seven of our days to[Pg 34] turn once on its axis. So for fourteen days there is continuous night, when the temperature must sink away down towards the absolute cold of space. This will be followed without an instant of twilight by full daylight. For another fourteen days the sun's rays will bear straight down, with no diffusion or absorption of their heat, or light, on the way. It does not follow, however, that the temperature of the moon's surface must rise enormously. It may not even rise to the temperature of melting ice. Seeing there is no air there can be no check on radiation. The heat that the moon gets will radiate away immediately. We know that amongst the coldest places on the earth are the tops of very high mountains, the points that have reared themselves nearest to the sun but farthest out of the sheltering blanket of the earth's atmosphere. The actual temperature of the moon's surface by day is a moot point. It may be below the freezing-point or above the boiling-point of water.

The lack of air is considered by many astronomers to furnish the explanation of the enormous number of "craters" which pit the moon's surface. There are about a hundred thousand of these strange rings, and it is now believed by many that they are spots where very large meteorites, or even planetoids, splashed into the moon when its surface was still soft. Other astronomers think that they are the remains of gigantic bubbles which were raised in the moon's "skin," when the globe was still molten, by volcanic gases from below. A few astronomers think that they are, as is popularly supposed, the craters of extinct volcanoes. Our craters, on the earth, are generally deep cups, whereas these ring-formations on the moon are more like very shallow and broad saucers. Clavius, the largest of them, is 123 miles across the interior, yet its encircling rampart is not a mile high.

The mountains on the moon (Fig. 16) rise to a great height,[Pg 35] and are extraordinarily gaunt and rugged. They are like fountains of lava, rising in places to 26,000 and 27,000 feet. The lunar Apennines have three thousand steep and weird peaks. Our terrestrial mountains are continually worn down by frost acting on moisture and by ice and water, but there are none of these agencies operating on the moon. Its mountains are comparatively "everlasting hills."

The moon is interesting to us precisely because it is a dead world. It seems to show how the earth, or any cooling metal globe, will evolve in the remote future. We do not know if there was ever life on the moon, but in any case it cannot have proceeded far in development. At the most we can imagine some strange lowly forms of vegetation lingering here and there in pools of heavy gas, expanding during the blaze of the sun's long day, and frozen rigid during the long night.

We may conclude our survey of the solar system with a word about "shooting stars," or meteors, and comets. There are few now who do not know that the streak of fire which suddenly lights the sky overhead at night means that a piece of stone or iron has entered our atmosphere from outer space, and has been burned up by friction. It was travelling at, perhaps, twenty or thirty miles a second. At seventy or eighty miles above our heads it began to glow, as at that height the air is thick enough to offer serious friction and raise it to a white heat. By the time the meteor reached about twenty miles or so from the earth's surface it was entirely dissipated, as a rule in fiery vapour.

It is estimated that between ten and a hundred million meteorites enter our atmosphere and are cremated, every day.[Pg 36] Most of them weigh only an ounce or two, and are invisible. Some of them weigh a ton or more, but even against these large masses the air acts as a kind of "torpedo-net." They generally burst into fragments and fall without doing damage.

It is clear that "empty space" is, at least within the limits of our solar system, full of these things. They swarm like fishes in the seas. Like the fishes, moreover, they may be either solitary or gregarious. The solitary bit of cosmic rubbish is the meteorite, which we have just examined. A "social" group of meteorites is the essential part of a comet. The nucleus, or bright central part, of the head of a comet (Fig. 19) consists of a swarm, sometimes thousands of miles wide, of these pieces of iron or stone. This swarm has come under the sun's gravitational influence, and is forced to travel round it. From some dark region of space it has moved slowly into our system. It is not then a comet, for it has no tail. But as the crowded meteors approach the sun, the speed increases. They give off fine vapour-like matter and the fierce flood of light from the sun sweeps this vapour out in an ever-lengthening tail. Whatever way the comet is travelling, the tail always points away from the sun.

The vapoury tail often grows to an enormous length as the comet approaches the sun. The great comet of 1843 had a tail two hundred million miles long. It is, however, composed of the thinnest vapours imaginable. Twice during the nineteenth century the earth passed through the tail of a comet, and nothing was felt. The vapours of the tail are, in fact, so attenuated that we can hardly imagine them to be white-hot. They may be lit by some electrical force. However that may be, the comet dashes round the sun, often at three or four hundred miles a second, then may pass gradually out of our system once more. It may be a thousand years, or it may be fifty years, before[Pg 37] the monarch of the system will summon it again to make its fiery journey round his throne.

The immensity of the Stellar Universe, as we have seen, is beyond our apprehension. The sun is nothing more than a very ordinary star, perhaps an insignificant one. There are stars enormously greater than the sun. One such, Betelgeux, has recently been measured, and its diameter is more than 300 times that of the sun.

The proof of the similarity between our sun and the stars has come to us through the spectroscope. The elements that we find by its means in the sun are also found in the same way in the stars. Matter, says the spectroscope, is essentially the same everywhere, in the earth and the sun, in the comet that visits us once in a thousand years, in the star whose distance is incalculable, and in the great clouds of "fire-mist" that we call nebulæ.

In considering the evolution of the stars let us keep two points clearly in mind. The starting-point, the nebula, is no figment of the scientific imagination. Hundreds of thousands of nebulæ, besides even vaster irregular stretches of nebulous matter, exist in the heavens. But the stages of the evolution of this stuff into stars are very largely a matter of speculation. Possibly there is more than one line of evolution, and the various theories may be reconciled. And this applies also to the theories of the various stages through which the stars themselves pass on their way to extinction.

The light of about a quarter of a million stars has been analysed in the spectroscope, and it is found that they fall into about[Pg 38] a dozen classes which generally correspond to stages in their evolution (Fig. 21).

In its main lines the spectrum of a star corresponds to its colour, and we may roughly group the stars into red, yellow, and white. This is also the order of increasing temperature, the red stars being the coolest and the white stars the hottest. We might therefore imagine that the white stars are the youngest, and that as they grow older and cooler they become yellowish, then red, and finally become invisible—just as a cooling white-hot iron would do. But a very interesting recent research shows that there are two kinds of red stars; some of them are amongst the oldest stars and some are amongst the youngest. The facts appear to be that when a star is first formed it is not very hot. It is an immense mass of diffuse gas glowing with a dull-red heat. It contracts under the mutual gravitation of its particles, and as it does so it grows hotter. It acquires a yellowish tinge. As it continues to contract it grows hotter and hotter until its temperature reaches a maximum as a white star. At this point the contraction process does not stop, but the heating process does. Further contraction is now accompanied by cooling, and the star goes through its colour changes again, but this time in the inverse order. It contracts and cools to yellow and finally to red. But when it again becomes a red star it is enormously denser and smaller than when it began as a red star. Consequently the red stars are divided into two classes called, appropriately, Giants and Dwarfs. This theory, which we owe to an American astronomer, H. N. Russell, has been successful in explaining a variety of phenomena, and there is consequently good reason to suppose it to be true. But the question as to how the red giant stars were formed has received less satisfactory and precise answers.

The most commonly accepted theory is the nebular theory.[Pg 39]

Nebulæ are dim luminous cloud-like patches in the heavens, more like wisps of smoke in some cases than anything else. Both photography and the telescope show that they are very numerous, hundreds of thousands being already known and the number being continually added to. They are not small. Most of them are immensely large. Actual dimensions cannot be given, because to estimate these we must first know definitely the distance of the nebulæ from the earth. The distances of some nebulæ are known approximately, and we can therefore form some idea of size in these cases. The results are staggering. The mere visible surface of some nebulæ is so large that the whole stretch of the solar system would be too small to form a convenient unit for measuring it. A ray of light would require to travel for years to cross from side to side of such a nebula. Its immensity is inconceivable to the human mind.

There appear to be two types of nebulæ, and there is evidence suggesting that the one type is only an earlier form of the other; but this again we do not know.

The more primitive nebulæ would seem to be composed of gas in an extremely rarified form. It is difficult to convey an adequate idea of the rarity of nebular gases. The residual gases in a vacuum tube are dense by comparison. A cubic inch of air at ordinary pressure would contain more matter than is contained in millions of cubic inches of the gases of nebulæ. The light of even the faintest stars does not seem to be dimmed by passing through a gaseous nebula, although we cannot be sure on this point. The most remarkable physical fact about these gases is that they are luminous. Whence they derive their luminosity we do not know. It hardly seems possible to believe that extremely thin gases exposed to the terrific cold of space can be so hot as to be luminous and can retain their heat and their luminosity[Pg 40] indefinitely. A cold luminosity due to electrification, like that of the aurora borealis, would seem to fit the case better.

Now the nebular theory is that out of great "fire-mists," such as we have described, stars are born. We do not know whether gravitation is the only or even the main force at work in a nebula, but it is supposed that under the action of gravity the far-flung "fire-mists" would begin to condense round centres of greatest density, heat being evolved in the process. Of course the condensation would be enormously slow, although the sudden irruption of a swarm of meteors or some solid body might hasten matters greatly by providing large, ready-made centres of condensation.

It is then supposed that the contracting mass of gas would begin to rotate and to throw off gigantic streamers, which would in their turn form centres of condensation. The whole structure would thus form a spiral, having a dense region at its centre and knots or lumps of condensed matter along its spiral arms. Besides the formless gaseous nebulæ there are hundreds of thousands of "spiral" nebulæ such as we have just mentioned in the heavens. They are at all stages of development, and they are visible to us at all angles—that is to say, some of them face directly towards us, others are edge on, and some are in intermediate positions. It appears, therefore, that we have here a striking confirmation of the nebular hypothesis. But we must not go so fast. There is much controversy as to the nature of these spiral nebulæ. Some eminent astronomers think they are other stellar universes, comparable in size with our own. In any case they are vast structures, and if they represent stars in process of condensation, they must be giving birth to huge agglomerations of stars—to star clusters at least. These vast and enigmatic objects do not throw much light on the origin of our own solar system. The nebular hypothesis, which was invented by[Pg 41] Laplace to explain the origin of our solar system, has not yet met with universal acceptance. The explanation offers grave difficulties, and it is best while the subject is still being closely investigated, to hold all opinions with reserve. It may be taken as probable, however, that the universe has developed from masses of incandescent gas.

Many astronomers believe that in "variable stars" we have another star, following that of the dullest red star, in the dying of suns. The light of these stars varies periodically in so many days, weeks, or years. It is interesting to speculate that they are slowly dying suns, in which the molten interior periodically bursts through the shell of thick vapours that is gathering round them. What we saw about our sun seems to point to some such stage in the future. That is, however, not the received opinion about variable stars. It may be that they are stars which periodically pass through a great swarm of meteors or a region of space that is rich in cosmic dust of some sort, when, of course, a great illumination would take place.

One class of these variable stars, which takes its name from the star Algol, is of special interest. Every third night Algol has its light reduced for several hours. Modern astronomy has discovered that in this case there are really two stars, circulating round a common centre, and that every third night the fainter of the two comes directly between us and its companion and causes an "eclipse." This was until recently regarded as a most interesting case in which a dead star revealed itself to us by passing before the light of another star. But astronomers have in recent years invented something, the "selenium-cell," which is even more sensitive than the photographic plate, and on this the[Pg 42] supposed dead star registers itself as very much alive. Algol is, however, interesting in another way. The pair of stars which we have discovered in it are hundreds of trillions of miles away from the earth, yet we know their masses and their distances from each other.

We have no positive knowledge of dead stars; which is not surprising when we reflect that a dead star means an invisible star! But when we see so many individual stars tending toward death, when we behold a vast population of all conceivable ages, we presume that there are many already dead. On the other hand, there is no reason to suppose that the universe as a whole is "running down." Some writers have maintained this, but their argument implies that we know a great deal more about the universe than we actually do. The scientific man does not know whether the universe is finite or infinite, temporal or eternal; and he declines to speculate where there are no facts to guide him. He knows only that the great gaseous nebulæ promise myriads of worlds in the future, and he concedes the possibility that new nebulæ may be forming in the ether of space.

The last, and not the least interesting, subject we have to notice is the birth of a "new star." This is an event which astronomers now announce every few years; and it is a far more portentous event than the reader imagines when it is reported in his daily paper. The story is much the same in all cases. We say that the star appeared in 1901, but you begin to realise the magnitude of the event when you learn that the distant "blaze" had really occurred about the time of the death of Luther! The light of the conflagration had been speeding toward us across space at 186,000 miles a second, yet it has taken nearly three centuries to reach us. To be visible at all to us at that distance the fiery outbreak must have been stupendous. If a mass of petroleum ten times the size of the earth were suddenly fired it would not[Pg 43] be seen at such a distance. The new star had increased its light many hundredfold in a few days.

There is a considerable fascination about the speculation that in such cases we see the resurrection of a dead world, a means of renewing the population of the universe. What happens is that in some region of the sky where no star, or only a very faint star, had been registered on our charts, we almost suddenly perceive a bright star. In a few days it may rise to the highest brilliancy. By the spectroscope we learn that this distant blaze means a prodigious outpour of white-hot hydrogen at hundreds of miles a second. But the star sinks again after a few months, and we then find a nebula round it on every side. It is natural to suppose that a dead or dying sun has somehow been reconverted in whole or in part into a nebula. A few astronomers think that it may have partially collided with another star, or approached too closely to another, with the result we described on an earlier page. The general opinion now is that a faint or dead star had rushed into one of those regions of space in which there are immense stretches of nebulous matter, and been (at least in part) vaporised by the friction.

But the difficulties are considerable, and some astronomers prefer to think that the blazing star may merely have lit up a dark nebula which already existed. It is one of those problems on which speculation is most tempting but positive knowledge is still very incomplete. We may be content, even proud, that already we can take a conflagration that has occurred more than a thousand trillion miles away and analyse it positively into an outflame of glowing hydrogen gas at so many miles a second.

What is the shape of our universe, and what are its dimensions? This is a tremendous question to ask. It is like asking[Pg 44] an intelligent insect, living on a single leaf in the midst of a great Brazilian forest, to say what is the shape and size of the forest. Yet man's ingenuity has proved equal to giving an answer even to this question, and by a method exactly similar to that which would be adopted by the insect. Suppose, for instance, that the forest was shaped as an elongated oval, and the insect lived on a tree near the centre of the oval. If the trees were approximately equally spaced from one another they would appear much denser along the length of the oval than across its width. This is the simple consideration that has guided astronomers in determining the shape of our stellar universe. There is one direction in the heavens along which the stars appear denser than in the directions at right angles to it. That direction is the direction in which we look towards the Milky Way. If we count the number of stars visible all over the heavens, we find they become more and more numerous as we approach the Milky Way. As we go farther and farther from the Milky Way the stars thin out until they reach a maximum sparseness in directions at right angles to the plane of the Milky Way. We may consider the Milky Way to form, as it were, the equator of our system, and the line at right angles to point to the north and south poles.

Our system, in fact, is shaped something like a lens, and our sun is situated near the centre of this lens. In the remoter part of this lens, near its edge, or possibly outside it altogether, lies the great series of star clouds which make up the Milky Way. All the stars are in motion within this system, but the very remarkable discovery has been made that these motions are not entirely random. The great majority of the stars whose motions can be measured fall into two groups drifting past one another in opposite directions. The velocity of one stream relative to the other is about twenty-five miles per second. The stars forming these two groups are thoroughly well mixed; it is not a case of an inner stream going one way and an outer stream the[Pg 45] other. But there are not quite as many stars going one way as the other. For every two stars in one stream there are three in the other. Now, as we have said, some eminent astronomers hold that the spiral nebulæ are universes like our own, and if we look at the two photographs (Figs. 25 and 26) we see that these spirals present features which, in the light of what we have just said about our system, are very remarkable. The nebula in Coma Berenices is a spiral edge-on to us, and we see that it has precisely the lens-shaped middle and the general flattened shape that we have found in our own system. The nebula in Canes Venatici is a spiral facing towards us, and its shape irresistibly suggests motions along the spiral arms. This motion, whether it is towards or away from the central, lens-shaped portion, would cause a double streaming motion in that central portion of the kind we have found in our own system. Again, and altogether apart from these considerations, there are good reasons for supposing our Milky Way to possess a double-armed spiral structure. And the great patches of dark absorbing matter which are known to exist in the Milky Way (see Fig. 22) would give very much the mottled appearance we notice in the arms (which we see edge-on) of the nebula in Coma Berenices. The[Pg 46] hypothesis, therefore, that our universe is a spiral nebula has much to be said for it. If it be accepted it greatly increases our estimate of the size of the material universe. For our central, lens-shaped system is calculated to extend towards the Milky Way for more than twenty thousand times a million million miles, and about a third of this distance towards what we have called the poles. If, as we suppose, each spiral nebula is an independent stellar universe comparable in size with our own, then, since there are hundreds of thousands of spiral nebulæ, we see that the size of the whole material universe is indeed beyond our comprehension.

FIG. 27

In this simple outline we have not touched on some of the more debatable questions that engage the attention of modern astronomers. Many of these questions have not yet passed the controversial stage; out of these will emerge the astronomy of the[Pg 47] future. But we have seen enough to convince us that, whatever advances the future holds in store, the science of the heavens constitutes one of the most important stones in the wonderful fabric of human knowledge.

The instruments used in modern astronomy are amongst the finest triumphs of mechanical skill in the world. In a great modern observatory the different instruments are to be counted by the score, but there are two which stand out pre-eminent as the fundamental instruments of modern astronomy. These instruments are the telescope and the spectroscope, and without them astronomy, as we know it, could not exist.

There is still some dispute as to where and when the first telescope was constructed; as an astronomical instrument, however, it dates from the time of the great Italian scientist Galileo, who, with a very small and imperfect telescope of his own invention, first observed the spots on the sun, the mountains of the moon, and the chief four satellites of Jupiter. A good pair of modern binoculars is superior to this early instrument of Galileo's, and the history of telescope construction, from that primitive instrument to the modern giant recently erected on Mount Wilson, California, is an exciting chapter in human progress. But the early instruments have only an historic interest: the era of modern telescopes begins in the nineteenth century.

During the last century telescope construction underwent an unprecedented development. An immense amount of interest was taken in the construction of large telescopes, and the different countries of the world entered on an exciting race to produce the most powerful possible instruments. Besides this[Pg 48] rivalry of different countries there was a rivalry of methods. The telescope developed along two different lines, and each of these two types has its partisans at the present day. These types are known as refractors and reflectors, and it is necessary to mention, briefly, the principles employed in each. The refractor is the ordinary, familiar type of telescope. It consists, essentially, of a large lens at one end of a tube, and a small lens, called the eye-piece, at the other. The function of the large lens is to act as a sort of gigantic eye. It collects a large amount of light, an amount proportional to its size, and brings this light to a focus within the tube of the telescope. It thus produces a small but bright image, and the eye-piece magnifies this image. In the reflector, instead of a large lens at the top of the tube, a large mirror is placed at the bottom. This mirror is so shaped as to reflect the light that falls on it to a focus, whence the light is again led to an eye-piece. Thus the refractor and the reflector differ chiefly in their manner of gathering light. The powerfulness of the telescope depends on the size of the light-gatherer. A telescope with a lens four inches in diameter is four times as powerful as the one with a lens two inches in diameter, for the amount of light gathered obviously depends on the area of the lens, and the area varies as the square of the diameter.

The largest telescopes at present in existence are reflectors. It is much easier to construct a very large mirror than to construct a very large lens; it is also cheaper. A mirror is more likely to get out of order than is a lens, however, and any irregularity in the shape of a mirror produces a greater distorting effect than in a lens. A refractor is also more convenient to handle than is a reflector. For these reasons great refractors are still made, but the largest of them, the great Yerkes' refractor, is much smaller than the greatest reflector, the one on Mount Wilson, California. The lens of the Yerkes' refractor measures three feet four inches in diameter, whereas the Mount Wilson reflector has a diameter of no less than eight feet four inches.

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But there is a device whereby the power of these giant instruments, great as it is, can be still further heightened. That device is the simple one of allowing the photographic plate to take the place of the human eye. Nowadays an astronomer seldom spends the night with his eye glued to the great telescope. He puts a photographic plate there. The photographic plate has this advantage over the eye, that it builds up impressions. However long we stare at an object too faint to be seen, we shall never see it. With the photographic plate, however, faint impressions go on accumulating. As hour after hour passes, the star which was too faint to make a perceptible impression on the plate goes on affecting it until finally it makes an impression which can be made visible. In this way the photographic plate reveals to us phenomena in the heavens which cannot be seen even through the most powerful telescopes.

Telescopes of the kind we have been discussing, telescopes for exploring the heavens, are mounted equatorially; that is to say, they are mounted on an inclined pillar parallel to the axis of the earth so that, by rotating round this pillar, the telescope is enabled to follow the apparent motion of a star due to the rotation of the earth. This motion is effected by clock-work, so that, once adjusted on a star, and the clock-work started, the telescope remains adjusted on that star for any length of time that is desired. But a great official observatory, such as Greenwich Observatory or the Observatory at Paris, also has transit instruments, or telescopes smaller than the equatorials and without the same facility of movement, but which, by a number of exquisite refinements, are more adapted to accurate measurements. It is these instruments which are chiefly used in the compilation of the Nautical Almanac. They do not follow the apparent motions of the stars. Stars are allowed to drift across the field of vision, and as each star crosses a small group of parallel wires in the eye-piece its precise time of passage is recorded. Owing to their relative fixity of position these instruments can be constructed to record the[Pg 50] positions of stars with much greater accuracy than is possible to the more general and flexible mounting of equatorials. The recording of transit is comparatively dry work; the spectacular element is entirely absent; stars are treated merely as mathematical points. But these observations furnish the very basis of modern mathematical astronomy, and without them such publications as the Nautical Almanac and the Connaissance du Temps would be robbed of the greater part of their importance.

We have already learnt something of the principles of the spectroscope, the instrument which, by making it possible to learn the actual constitution of the stars, has added a vast new domain to astronomy. In the simplest form of this instrument the analysing portion consists of a single prism. Unless the prism is very large, however, only a small degree of dispersion is obtained. It is obviously desirable, for accurate analytical work, that the dispersion—that is, the separation of the different parts of the spectrum—should be as great as possible. The dispersion can be increased by using a large number of prisms, the light emerging from the first prism, entering the second, and so on. In this way each prism produces its own dispersive effect and, when a number of prisms are employed, the final dispersion is considerable. A considerable amount of light is absorbed in this way, however, so that unless our primary source of light is very strong, the final spectrum will be very feeble and hard to decipher.

Another way of obtaining considerable dispersion is by using a diffraction grating instead of a prism. This consists essentially of a piece of glass on which lines are ruled by a diamond point. When the lines are sufficiently close together they split up light falling on them into its constituents and produce a spectrum.[Pg 51] The modern diffraction grating is a truly wonderful piece of work. It contains several thousands of lines to the inch, and these lines have to be spaced with the greatest accuracy. But in this instrument, again, there is a considerable loss of light.

We have said that every substance has its own distinctive spectrum, and it might be thought that, when a list of the spectra of different substances has been prepared, spectrum analysis would become perfectly straightforward. In practice, however, things are not quite so simple. The spectrum emitted by a substance is influenced by a variety of conditions. The pressure, the temperature, the state of motion of the object we are observing, all make a difference, and one of the most laborious tasks of the modern spectroscopist is to disentangle these effects from one another. Simple as it is in its broad outlines, spectroscopy is, in reality, one of the most intricate branches of modern science.

(The following list of books may be useful to readers wishing to pursue further the study of Astronomy.)

Ball, The Story of the Heavens.
Ball, The Story of the Sun.
Forbes, History of Astronomy.
Hincks, Astronomy.
Kippax, Call of the Stars.
Lowell, Mars and Its Canals.
Lowell, Evolution of Worlds.
McKready, A Beginner's Star-Book.
Newcomb, Popular Astronomy.
Newcomb, The Stars: A Study of the Universe.
Olcott, Field Book of the Stars.
Price, Essence of Astronomy.
Serviss, Curiosities of the Skies.
Webb, Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes.
Young, Text-Book of General Astronomy.

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The Evolution-idea is a master-key that opens many doors. It is a luminous interpretation of the world, throwing the light of the past upon the present. Everything is seen to be an antiquity, with a history behind it—a natural history, which enables us to understand in some measure how it has come to be as it is. We cannot say more than "understand in some measure," for while the fact of evolution is certain, we are only beginning to discern the factors that have been at work.

The evolution-idea is very old, going back to some of the Greek philosophers, but it is only in modern times that it has become an essential part of our mental equipment. It is now an everyday intellectual tool. It was applied to the origin of the solar system and to the making of the earth before it was applied to plants and animals; it was extended from these to man himself; it spread to language, to folk-ways, to institutions. Within recent years the evolution-idea has been applied to the chemical elements, for it appears that uranium may change into radium, that radium may produce helium, and that lead is the final stable result when the changes of uranium are complete. Perhaps all the elements may be the outcome of an inorganic evolution. Not less important is the extension of the evolution-idea to the world within as well as to the world without. For alongside of the evolution of bodies and brains is the evolution of feelings and emotions, ideas and imagination.[Pg 56]

Organic evolution means that the present is the child of the past and the parent of the future. It is not a power or a principle; it is a process—a process of becoming. It means that the present-day animals and plants and all the subtle inter-relations between them have arisen in a natural knowable way from a preceding state of affairs on the whole somewhat simpler, and that again from forms and inter-relations simpler still, and so on backwards and backwards for millions of years till we lose all clues in the thick mist that hangs over life's beginnings.

Our solar system was once represented by a nebula of some sort, and we may speak of the evolution of the sun and the planets. But since it has been the same material throughout that has changed in its distribution and forms, it might be clearer to use some word like genesis. Similarly, our human institutions were once very different from what they are now, and we may speak of the evolution of government or of cities. But Man works with a purpose, with ideas and ideals in some measure controlling his actions and guiding his achievements, so that it is probably clearer to keep the good old word history for all processes of social becoming in which man has been a conscious agent. Now between the genesis of the solar system and the history of civilisation there comes the vast process of organic evolution. The word development should be kept for the becoming of the individual, the chick out of the egg, for instance.

Organic evolution is a continuous natural process of racial change, by successive steps in a definite direction, whereby distinctively new individualities arise, take root, and flourish, sometimes alongside of, and sometimes, sooner or later, in place of, the originative stock. Our domesticated breeds of pigeons and poultry are the results of evolutionary change whose origins are still with us in the Rock Dove and the Jungle Fowl; but in most cases in Wild Nature the ancestral stocks of present-day forms are long since extinct, and in many cases they are unknown. Evolution is a long process of coming and going, appearing and disappearing,[Pg 57] a long-drawn-out sublime process like a great piece of music.

When we speak the language of science we cannot say "In the beginning," for we do not know of and cannot think of any condition of things that did not arise from something that went before. But we may qualify the phrase, and legitimately inquire into the beginning of the earth within the solar system. If the result of this inquiry is to trace the sun and the planets back to a nebula we reach only a relative beginning. The nebula has to be accounted for. And even before matter there may have been a pre-material world. If we say, as was said long ago, "In the beginning was Mind," we may be expressing or trying to express a great truth, but we have gone BEYOND SCIENCE.

One of the grandest pictures that the scientific mind has ever thrown upon the screen is that of the Nebular Hypothesis. According to Laplace's famous form of this theory (1796), the solar system was once a gigantic glowing mass, spinning slowly and uniformly around its centre. As the incandescent world-cloud of gas cooled and its speed of rotation increased the shrinking mass gave off a separate whirling ring, which broke up and gathered together again as the first and most distant planet. The main mass gave off another ring and another till all the planets, including the earth, were formed. The central mass persisted as the sun.

Laplace spoke of his theory, which Kant had anticipated forty-one years before, with scientific caution: "conjectures which I present with all the distrust which everything not the result of observation or of calculation ought to inspire." Subsequent research justified his distrust, for it has been shown that the original nebula need not have been hot and need not have been gaseous.[Pg 58] Moreover, there are great difficulties in Laplace's theory of the separation of successive rings from the main mass, and of the condensation of a whirling gaseous ring into a planet.

So it has come about that the picture of a hot gaseous nebula revolving as a unit body has given place to other pictures. Thus Sir Norman Lockyer pointed out (1890) that the earth is gathering to itself millions of meteorites every day; this has been going on for millions of years; in distant ages the accretion may have been vastly more rapid and voluminous; and so the earth has grown! Now the meteoritic contributions are undoubted, but they require a centre to attract them, and the difficulty is to account for the beginning of a collecting centre or planetary nucleus. Moreover, meteorites are sporadic and erratic, scattered hither and thither rather than collecting into unit-bodies. As Professor Chamberlin says, "meteorites have rather the characteristics of the wreckage of some earlier organisation than of the parentage of our planetary system." Several other theories have been propounded to account for the origin of the earth, but the one that has found most favour in the eyes of authorities is that of Chamberlin and Moulton. According to this theory a great nebular mass condensed to form the sun, from which under the attraction of passing stars planet after planet, the earth included, was heaved off in the form of knotted spiral nebulæ, like many of those now observed in the heavens.

Of great importance were the "knots," for they served as collecting centres drawing flying matter into their clutches. Whatever part of the primitive bolt escaped and scattered was drawn out into independent orbits round the sun, forming the "planetesimals" which behave like minute planets. These planetesimals formed the food on which the knots subsequently fed.

It has been calculated that the newborn earth—the "earth-knot" of Chamberlin's theory—had a diameter of about 5,500[Pg 59] miles. But it grew by drawing planetesimals into itself until it had a diameter of over 8,100 miles at the end of its growing period. Since then it has shrunk, by periodic shrinkages which have meant the buckling up of successive series of mountains, and it has now a diameter of 7,918 miles. But during the shrinking the earth became more varied.

A sort of slow boiling of the internally hot earth often forced molten matter through the cold outer crust, and there came about a gradual assortment of lighter materials nearer the surface and heavier materials deeper down. The continents are built of the lighter materials, such as granites, while the beds of the great oceans are made of the heavier materials such as basalts. In limited areas land has often become sea, and sea has often given place to land, but the probability is that the distinction of the areas corresponding to the great continents and oceans goes back to a very early stage.

The lithosphere is the more or less stable crust of the earth, which may have been, to begin with, about fifty miles in thickness. It seems that the young earth had no atmosphere, and that ages passed before water began to accumulate on its surface—before, in other words, there was any hydrosphere. The water came from the earth itself, to begin with, and it was long before there was any rain dissolving out saline matter from the exposed rocks and making the sea salt. The weathering of the high grounds of the ancient crust by air and water furnished the material which formed the sandstones and mudstones and other sedimentary rocks, which are said to amount to a thickness of over fifty miles in all.

It is interesting to inquire how the callous, rough-and-tumble conditions of the outer world in early days were replaced by others that allowed of the germination and growth of that[Pg 60] tender plant we call LIFE. There are very tough living creatures, but the average organism is ill suited for violence. Most living creatures are adapted to mild temperatures and gentle reactions. Hence the fundamental importance of the early atmosphere, heavy with planetesimal dust, in blanketing the earth against intensities of radiance from without, as Chamberlin says, and inequalities of radiance from within. This was the first preparation for life, but it was an atmosphere without free oxygen. Not less important was the appearance of pools and lakelets, of lakes and seas. Perhaps the early waters covered the earth. And water was the second preparation for life—water, that can dissolve a larger variety of substances in greater concentration than any other liquid; water, that in summer does not readily evaporate altogether from a pond, nor in winter freeze throughout its whole extent; water, that is such a mobile vehicle and such a subtle cleaver of substances; water, that forms over 80 per cent. of living matter itself.

Of great significance was the abundance of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (in the form of carbonic acid and water) in the atmosphere of the cooling earth, for these three wonderful elements have a unique ensemble of properties—ready to enter into reactions and relations, making great diversity and complexity possible, favouring the formation of the plastic and permeable materials that build up living creatures. We must not pursue the idea, but it is clear that the stones and mortar of the inanimate world are such that they built a friendly home for life.

During the early chapters of the earth's history, no living creature that we can imagine could possibly have lived there. The temperature was too high; there was neither atmosphere nor surface water. Therefore it follows that at some uncertain, but inconceivably distant date, living creatures appeared upon[Pg 61] the earth. No one knows how, but it is interesting to consider possibilities.

From ancient times it has been a favourite answer that the dust of the earth may have become living in a way which is outside scientific description. This answer forecloses the question, and it is far too soon to do that. Science must often say "Ignoramus": Science should be slow to say "Ignorabimus."

A second position held by Helmholtz, Lord Kelvin, and others, suggests that minute living creatures may have come to the earth from elsewhere, in the cracks of a meteorite or among cosmic dust. It must be remembered that seeds can survive prolonged exposure to very low temperatures; that spores of bacteria can survive high temperature; that seeds of plants and germs of animals in a state of "latent life" can survive prolonged drought and absence of oxygen. It is possible, according to Berthelot, that as long as there is not molecular disintegration vital activities may be suspended for a time, and may afterwards recommence when appropriate conditions are restored. Therefore, one should be slow to say that a long journey through space is impossible. The obvious limitation of Lord Kelvin's theory is that it only shifts the problem of the origin of organisms (i.e. living creatures) from the earth to elsewhere.

The third answer is that living creatures of a very simple sort may have emerged on the earth's surface from not-living material, e.g. from some semi-fluid carbon compounds activated by ferments. The tenability of this view is suggested by the achievements of the synthetic chemists, who are able artificially to build up substances such as oxalic acid, indigo, salicylic acid, caffeine, and grape-sugar. We do not know, indeed, what in Nature's laboratory would take the place of the clever synthetic chemist, but there seems to be a tendency to complexity. Corpuscles form atoms, atoms form molecules, small molecules large ones.[Pg 62]

Various concrete suggestions have been made in regard to the possible origin of living matter, which will be dealt with in a later chapter. So far as we know of what goes on to-day, there is no evidence of spontaneous generation; organisms seem always to arise from pre-existing organisms of the same kind; where any suggestion of the contrary has been fancied, there have been flaws in the experimenting. But it is one thing to accept the verdict "omne vivum e vivo" as a fact to which experiment has not yet discovered an exception and another thing to maintain that this must always have been true or must always remain true.

If the synthetic chemists should go on surpassing themselves, if substances like white of egg should be made artificially, and if we should get more light on possible steps by which simple living creatures may have arisen from not-living materials, this would not greatly affect our general outlook on life, though it would increase our appreciation of what is often libelled as "inert" matter. If the dust of the earth did naturally give rise very long ago to living creatures, if they are in a real sense born of her and of the sunshine, then the whole world becomes more continuous and more vital, and all the inorganic groaning and travailing becomes more intelligible.

We cannot have more than a speculative picture of the first living creatures upon the earth or, rather, in the waters that covered the earth. A basis for speculation is to be found, however, in the simplest creatures living to-day, such as some of the bacteria and one-celled animalcules, especially those called Protists, which have not taken any very definite step towards becoming either plants or animals. No one can be sure, but there is much to be said for the theory that the first creatures were[Pg 63] microscopic globules of living matter, not unlike the simplest bacteria of to-day, but able to live on air, water, and dissolved salts. From such a source may have originated a race of one-celled marine organisms which were able to manufacture chlorophyll, or something like chlorophyll, that is to say, the green pigment which makes it possible for plants to utilise the energy of the sunlight in breaking up carbon dioxide and in building up (photosynthesis) carbon compounds like sugars and starch. These little units were probably encased in a cell-wall of cellulose, but their boxed-in energy expressed itself in the undulatory movement of a lash or flagellum, by means of which they propelled themselves energetically through the water. There are many similar organisms to-day, mostly in water, but some of them—simple one-celled plants—paint the tree-stems and even the paving-stones green in wet weather. According to Prof. A. H. Church there was a long chapter in the history of the earth when the sea that covered everything teemed with these green flagellates—the originators of the Vegetable Kingdom.

On another tack, however, there probably evolved a series of simple predatory creatures, not able to build up organic matter from air, water, and salts, but devouring their neighbours. These units were not closed in with cellulose, but remained naked, with their living matter or protoplasm flowing out in changeful processes, such as we see in the Amœbæ in the ditch or in our own white blood corpuscles and other amœboid cells. These were the originators of the animal kingdom. Thus from very simple Protists the first animals and the first plants may have arisen. All were still very minute, and it is worth remembering that had there been any scientific spectator after our kind upon the earth during these long ages, he would have lamented the entire absence of life, although the seas were teeming. The simplest forms of life and the protoplasm which Huxley called the physical basis of life will be dealt with in the chapter on Biology in a later section of this work.[Pg 64]

However it may have come about, there is no doubt at all that one of the first great steps in Organic Evolution was the forking of the genealogical tree into Plants and Animals—the most important parting of the ways in the whole history of Nature.

Typical plants have chlorophyll; they are able to feed at a low chemical level on air, water, and salts, using the energy of the sunlight in their photosynthesis. They have their cells boxed in by cellulose walls, so that their opportunities for motility are greatly restricted. They manufacture much more nutritive material than they need, and live far below their income. They have no ready way of getting rid of any nitrogenous waste matter that they may form, and this probably helps to keep them sluggish.

Animals, on the other hand, feed at a high chemical level, on the carbohydrates (e.g. starch and sugar), fats, and proteins (e.g. gluten, albumin, casein) which are manufactured by other animals, or to begin with, by plants. Their cells have not cellulose walls, nor in most cases much wall of any kind, and motility in the majority is unrestricted. Animals live much more nearly up to their income. If we could make for an animal and a plant of equal weight two fractions showing the ratio of the upbuilding, constructive, chemical processes to the down-breaking, disruptive, chemical processes that go on in their respective bodies, the ratio for the plant would be much greater than the corresponding ratio for the animal. In other words, animals take the munitions which plants laboriously manufacture and explode them in locomotion[Pg 65] and work; and the entire system of animate nature depends upon the photosynthesis that goes on in green plants.

As the result of much more explosive life, animals have to deal with much in the way of nitrogenous waste products, the ashes of the living fire, but these are usually got rid of very effectively, e.g. in the kidney filters, and do not clog the system by being deposited as crystals and the like, as happens in plants. Sluggish animals like sea-squirts which have no kidneys are exceptions that prove the rule, and it need hardly be said that the statements that have been made in regard to the contrasts between plants and animals are general statements. There is often a good deal of the plant about the animal, as in sedentary sponges, zoophytes, corals, and sea-squirts, and there is often a little of the animal about the plant, as we see in the movements of all shoots and roots and leaves, and occasionally in the parts of the flower. But the important fact is that on the early forking of the genealogical tree, i.e. the divergence of plants and animals, there depended and depends all the higher life of the animal kingdom, not to speak of mankind. The continuance of civilisation, the upkeep of the human and animal population of the globe, and even the supply of oxygen to the air we breathe, depend on the silent laboratories of the green leaves, which are able with the help of the sunlight to use carbonic acid, water, and salts to build up the bread of life.

It is highly probable that for long ages the waters covered the earth, and that all the primeval vegetation consisted of simple Flagellates in the universal Open Sea. But contraction of the earth's crust brought about elevations and depressions of the sea-floor, and in places the solid substratum was brought near enough the surface to allow the floating plants to begin to settle down without getting out of the light. This is how Professor[Pg 66] Church pictures the beginning of a fixed vegetation—a very momentous step in evolution. It was perhaps among this early vegetation that animals had their first successes. As the floor of the sea in these shallow areas was raised higher and higher there was a beginning of dry land. The sedentary plants already spoken of were the ancestors of the shore seaweeds, and there is no doubt that when we go down at the lowest tide and wade cautiously out among the jungle of vegetation only exposed on such occasions we are getting a glimpse of very ancient days. This is the forest primeval.

Animals below the level of zoophytes and sponges are called Protozoa. The word obviously means "First Animals," but all that we can say is that the very simplest of them may give us some hint of the simplicity of the original first animals. For it is quite certain that the vast majority of the Protozoa to-day are far too complicated to be thought of as primitive. Though most of them are microscopic, each is an animal complete in itself, with the same fundamental bodily attributes as are manifested in ourselves. They differ from animals of higher degree in not being built up of the unit areas or corpuscles called cells. They have no cells, no tissues, no organs, in the ordinary acceptation of these words, but many of them show a great complexity of internal structure, far exceeding that of the ordinary cells that build up the tissues of higher animals. They are complete living creatures which have not gone in for body-making.

In the dim and distant past there was a time when the only animals were of the nature of Protozoa, and it is safe to say that one of the great steps in evolution was the establishment of three great types of Protozoa: (a) Some were very active, the Infusorians, like the slipper animalcule, the night-light (Noctiluca), which makes the seas phosphorescent at night, and the deadly Trypanosome, which causes Sleeping Sickness.[Pg 67] (b) Others were very sluggish, the parasitic Sporozoa, like the malaria organism which the mosquito introduces into man's body. (c) Others were neither very active nor very passive, the Rhizopods, with out-flowing processes of living matter. This amœboid line of evolution has been very successful; it is represented by the Rhizopods, such as Amœbæ and the chalk-forming Foraminifera and the exquisitely beautiful flint-shelled Radiolarians of the open sea. They have their counterparts in the amœboid cells of most multicellular animals, such as the phagocytes which migrate about in the body, engulfing and digesting intruding bacteria, serving as sappers and miners when something has to be broken down and built up again, and performing other useful offices.

The great naturalist Louis Agassiz once said that the biggest gulf in Organic Nature was that between the unicellular and the multicellular animals (Protozoa and Metazoa). But the gulf was bridged very long ago when sponges, stinging animals, and simple worms were evolved, and showed, for the first time, a "body." What would one not give to be able to account for the making of a body, one of the great steps in evolution! No one knows, but the problem is not altogether obscure.

When an ordinary Protozoon or one-celled animal divides into two or more, which is its way of multiplying, the daughter-units thus formed float apart and live independent lives. But there are a few Protozoa in which the daughter-units are not quite separated off from one another, but remain coherent. Thus Volvox, a beautiful green ball, found in some canals and the like, is a colony of a thousand or even ten thousand cells. It has almost formed a body! But in this "colony-making" Protozoon, and in others like it, the component cells are all of one kind, whereas in true multicellular animals there are different kinds of[Pg 68] cells, showing division of labour. There are some other Protozoa in which the nucleus or kernel divides into many nuclei within the cell. This is seen in the Giant Amœba (Pelomyxa), sometimes found in duck-ponds, or the beautiful Opalina, which always lives in the hind part of the frog's food-canal. If a portion of the living matter of these Protozoa should gather round each of the nuclei, then that would be the beginning of a body. It would be still nearer the beginning of a body if division of labour set in, and if there was a setting apart of egg-cells and sperm-cells distinct from body-cells.

It was possibly in some such way that animals and plants with a body were first evolved. Two points should be noticed, that body-making is not essentially a matter of size, though it made large size possible. For the body of a many-celled Wheel Animalcule or Rotifer is no bigger than many a Protozoon. Yet the Rotifer—we are thinking of Hydatina—has nine hundred odd cells, whereas the Protozoon has only one, except in forms like Volvox. Secondly, it is a luminous fact that every many-celled animal from sponge to man that multiplies in the ordinary way begins at the beginning again as a "single cell," the fertilised egg-cell. It is, of course, not an ordinary single cell that develops into an earthworm or a butterfly, an eagle, or a man; it is a cell in which a rich inheritance, the fruition of ages, is somehow condensed; but it is interesting to bear in mind the elementary fact that every many-celled creature, reproduced in the ordinary way and not by budding or the like, starts as a fertilised egg-cell. The coherence of the daughter-cells into which the fertilised egg-cell divides is a reminiscence, as it were, of the primeval coherence of daughter-units that made the first body possible.

A freshwater Hydra, growing on the duckweed usually multiplies by budding. It forms daughter-buds, living images of itself; a check comes to nutrition and these daughter-buds go[Pg 69] free. A big sea-anemone may divide in two or more parts, which become separate animals. This is asexual reproduction, which means that the multiplication takes place by dividing into two or many portions, and not by liberating egg-cells and sperm-cells. Among animals as among plants, asexual reproduction is very common. But it has great disadvantages, for it is apt to be physiologically expensive, and it is beset with difficulties when the body shows great division of labour, and is very intimately bound into unity. Thus, no one can think of a bee or a bird multiplying by division or by budding. Moreover, if the body of the parent has suffered from injury or deterioration, the result of this is bound to be handed on to the next generation if asexual reproduction is the only method.

Splitting into two or many parts was the old-fashioned way of multiplying, but one of the great steps in evolution was the discovery of a better method, namely, sexual reproduction. The gist of this is simply that during the process of body-building (by the development of the fertilised egg-cell) certain units, the germ-cells, do not share in forming ordinary tissues or organs, but remain apart, continuing the full inheritance which was condensed in the fertilised egg-cell. These cells kept by themselves are the originators of the future reproductive cells of the mature animal; they give rise to the egg-cells and the sperm-cells.

The advantages of this method are great. (1) The new generation is started less expensively, for it is easier to shed germ-cells into the cradle of the water than to separate off half of the body. (2) It is possible to start a great many new lives at once, and this may be of vital importance when the struggle for existence is very keen, and when parental care is impossible. (3) The germ-cells are little likely to be prejudicially affected by disadvantageous dints impressed on the body of the parent—little likely unless the dints have peculiarly penetrating consequences, as in the case of poisons. (4) A further advantage is[Pg 70] implied in the formation of two kinds of germ-cells—the ovum or egg-cell, with a considerable amount of building material and often with a legacy of nutritive yolk; the spermatozoon or sperm-cell, adapted to move in fluids and to find the ovum from a distance, thus securing change-provoking cross-fertilisation.

Another of the great steps in organic evolution was the differentiation of two different physiological types, the male or sperm-producer and the female or egg-producer. It seems to be a deep-seated difference in constitution, which leads one egg to develop into a male, and another, lying beside it in the nest, into a female. In the case of pigeons it seems almost certain, from the work of Professor Oscar Riddle, that there are two kinds of egg, a male-producing egg and a female-producing egg, which differ in their yolk-forming and other physiological characters.

In sea-urchins we often find two creatures superficially indistinguishable, but the one is a female with large ovaries and the other is a male with equally large testes. Here the physiological difference does not affect the body as a whole, but the reproductive organs or gonads only, though more intimate physiology would doubtless discover differences in the blood or in the chemical routine (metabolism). In a large number of cases, however, there are marked superficial differences between the sexes, and everyone is familiar with such contrasts as peacock and peahen, stag and hind. In such cases the physiological difference between the sperm-producer and the ovum-producer, for this is the essential difference, saturates through the body and expresses itself in masculine and feminine structures and modes of behaviour. The expression of the masculine and feminine characters is in some cases under the control of hormones or chemical messengers which are carried by the blood from the reproductive organs throughout the body, and pull the trigger which brings[Pg 71] about the development of an antler or a wattle or a decorative plume or a capacity for vocal and saltatory display. In some cases it is certain that the female carries in a latent state the masculine features, but these are kept from expressing themselves by other chemical messengers from the ovary. Of these chemical messengers more must be said later on.

Recent research has shown that while the difference between male and female is very deep-rooted, corresponding to a difference in gearing, it is not always clear-cut. Thus a hen-pigeon may be very masculine, and a cock-pigeon very feminine. The difference is in degree, not in kind.

What is the meaning of the universal or almost universal inevitableness of death? A Sequoia or "Big Tree" of California has been known to live for over two thousand years, but eventually it died. A centenarian tortoise has been known, and a sea-anemone sixty years of age; but eventually they die. What is the meaning of this apparently inevitable stoppage of bodily life?

There are three chief kinds of death, (a) The great majority of animals come to a violent end, being devoured by others or killed by sudden and extreme changes in their surroundings. (b) When an animal enters a new habitat, or comes into new associations with other organisms, it may be invaded by a microbe or by some larger parasite to which it is unaccustomed and to which it can offer no resistance. With many parasites a "live-and-let-live" compromise is arrived at, but new parasites are apt to be fatal, as man knows to his cost when he is bitten by a tse-tse fly which infects him with the microscopic animal (a Trypanosome) that causes Sleeping Sickness. In many animals the parasites are not troublesome as long as the host is vigorous,[Pg 72] but if the host is out of condition the parasites may get the upper hand, as in the so-called "grouse disease," and become fatal. (c) But besides violent death and microbic (or parasitic) death, there is natural death. This is in great part to be regarded as the price paid for a body. A body worth having implies complexity or division of labour, and this implies certain internal furnishings of a more or less stable kind in which the effects of wear and tear are apt to accumulate. It is not the living matter itself that grows old so much as the framework in which it works—the furnishings of the vital laboratory. There are various processes of rejuvenescence, e.g. rest, repair, change, reorganisation, which work against the inevitable processes of senescence, but sooner or later the victory is with ageing. Another deep reason for natural death is to be found in the physiological expensiveness of reproduction, for many animals, from worms to eels, illustrate natural death as the nemesis of starting new lives. Now it is a very striking fact that to a large degree the simplest animals or Protozoa are exempt from natural death. They are so relatively simple that they can continually recuperate by rest and repair; they do not accumulate any bad debts. Moreover, their modes of multiplying, by dividing into two or many units, are very inexpensive physiologically. It seems that in some measure this bodily immortality of the Protozoa is shared by some simple many-celled animals like the freshwater Hydra and Planarian worms. Here is an interesting chapter in evolution, the evolution of means of evading or staving off natural death. Thus there is the well-known case of the Paloloworm of the coral-reefs where the body breaks up in liberating the germ-cells, but the head-end remains fixed in a crevice of the coral, and buds out a new body at leisure.

Along with the evolution of the ways of avoiding death should be considered also the gradual establishment of the length of life best suited to the welfare of the species, and the punctuation of the life-history to suit various conditions.

[Pg 73]

In animals like sea-anemones and jellyfishes the general symmetry of the body is radial; that is to say, there is no right or left, and the body might be halved along many planes. It is a kind of symmetry well suited for sedentary or for drifting life. But worms began the profitable habit of moving with one end of the body always in front, and from worms to man the great majority of animals have bilateral symmetry. They have a right and a left side, and there is only one cut that halves the body. This kind of symmetry is suited for a more strenuous life than radial animals show; it is suited for pursuing food, for avoiding enemies, for chasing mates. And with the establishment of bilateral symmetry must be associated the establishment of head-brains, the beginning of which is to be found in some simple worm-types.

Among the other great acquisitions gradually evolved we may notice: a well-developed head with sense-organs, the establishment of large internal surfaces such as the digestive and absorptive wall of the food-canal, the origin of quickly contracting striped muscle and of muscular appendages, the formation of blood as a distributing medium throughout the body, from which all the parts take what they need and to which they also contribute.

Another very important acquisition, almost confined (so far as is known) to backboned animals, was the evolution of what are called glands of internal secretion, such as the thyroid and the supra-renal. These manufacture subtle chemical substances which are distributed by the blood throughout the body, and have a manifold influence in regulating and harmonising the vital processes. Some of these chemical messengers are called hormones, which stimulate organs and tissues to greater activity; others are called chalones, which put on a brake. Some regulate[Pg 74] growth and others rapidly alter the pressure and composition of the blood. Some of them call into active development certain parts of the body which have been, as it were, waiting for an appropriate trigger-pulling. Thus, at the proper time, the milk-glands of a mammalian mother are awakened from their dormancy. This very interesting outcome of evolution will be dealt with in another portion of this work.

Before passing to a connected story of the gradual emergence of higher and higher forms of life in the course of the successive ages—the procession of life, as it may be called—it will be useful to consider the evolution of animal behaviour.

A human being begins as a microscopic fertilised egg-cell, within which there is condensed the long result of time—Man's inheritance. The long period of nine months before birth, with its intimate partnership between mother and offspring, is passed as it were in sleep, and no one can make any statement in regard to the mind of the unborn child. Even after birth the dawn of mind is as slow as it is wonderful. To begin with, there is in the ovum and early embryo no nervous system at all, and it develops very gradually from simple beginnings. Yet as mentality cannot come in from outside, we seem bound to conclude that the potentiality of it—whatever that means—resides in the individual from the very first. The particular kind of activity known to us as thinking, feeling, and willing is the most intimate part of our experience, known to us directly apart from our senses, and the possibility of that must be implicit in the germ-cell just as the genius of Newton was implicit in a very miserable specimen of an infant. Now what is true of the individual is true also of the race—there is a gradual evolution of that aspect of the living[Pg 75] creature's activity which we call mind. We cannot put our finger on any point and say: Before this stage there was no mind. Indeed, many facts suggest the conclusion that wherever there is life there is some degree of mind—even in the plants. Or it might be more accurate to put the conclusion in another way, that the activity we call life has always in some degree an inner or mental aspect.

In another part of this book there is an account of the dawn of mind in backboned animals; what we aim at here is an outline of what may be called the inclined plane of animal behaviour.

A very simple animal accumulates a little store of potential energy, and it proceeds to expend this, like an explosive, by acting on its environment. It does so in a very characteristic self-preservative fashion, so that it burns without being consumed and explodes without being blown to bits. It is characteristic of the organism that it remains a going concern for a longer or shorter period—its length of life. Living creatures that expended their energy ineffectively or self-destructively would be eliminated in the struggle for existence. When a simple one-celled organism explores a corner of the field seen under a microscope, behaving to all appearance very like a dog scouring a field seen through a telescope, it seems permissible to think of something corresponding to mental endeavour associated with its activity. This impression is strengthened when an amœba pursues another amœba, overtakes it, engulfs it, loses it, pursues it again, recaptures it, and so on. What is quite certain is that the behaviour of the animalcule is not like that of a potassium pill fizzing about in a basin of water, nor like the lurching movements of a gun that has got loose and "taken charge" on board ship. Another feature is that the locomotor activity of an animalcule often shows a distinct individuality: it may swim, for instance, in a loose spiral.

But there is another side to vital activity besides acting upon[Pg 76] the surrounding world; the living creature is acted on by influences from without. The organism acts on its environment; that is the one side of the shield: the environment acts upon the organism; that is the other side. If we are to see life whole we must recognise these two sides of what we call living, and it is missing an important part of the history of animal life if we fail to see that evolution implies becoming more advantageously sensitive to the environment, making more of its influences, shutting out profitless stimuli, and opening more gateways to knowledge. The bird's world is a larger and finer world than an earthworm's; the world means more to the bird than to the worm.

Simple creatures act with a certain degree of spontaneity on their environment, and they likewise react effectively to surrounding stimuli. Animals come to have definite "answers back," sometimes several, sometimes only one, as in the case of the Slipper Animalcule, which reverses its cilia when it comes within the sphere of some disturbing influence, retreats, and, turning upon itself tentatively, sets off again in the same general direction as before, but at an angle to the previous line. If it misses the disturbing influence, well and good; if it strikes it again, the tactics are repeated until a satisfactory way out is discovered or the stimulation proves fatal.

It may be said that the Slipper Animalcule has but one answer to every question, but there are many Protozoa which have several enregistered reactions. When there are alternative reactions which are tried one after another, the animal is pursuing what is called the trial-and-error method, and a higher note is struck.

There is an endeavour after satisfaction, and a trial of answers. When the creature profits by experience to the extent of giving the right answer first, there is the beginning of learning.

[Pg 77]

Among simple multicellular animals, such as sea-anemones, we find the beginnings of reflex actions, and a considerable part of the behaviour of the lower animals is reflex. That is to say, there are laid down in the animal in the course of its development certain pre-arrangements of nerve-cells and muscle-cells which secure that a fit and proper answer is given to a frequently recurrent stimulus. An earthworm half out of its burrow becomes aware of the light tread of a thrush's foot, and jerks itself back into its hole before anyone can say "reflex action." What is it that happens?

Certain sensory nerve-cells in the earthworm's skin are stimulated by vibrations in the earth; the message travels down a sensory nerve-fibre from each of the stimulated cells and enters the nerve-cord. The sensory fibres come into vital connection with branches of intermediary, associative, or communicating cells, which are likewise connected with motor nerve-cells. To these the message is thus shunted. From the motor nerve-cells an impulse or command travels by motor nerve-fibres, one from each cell, to the muscles, which contract. If this took as long to happen as it takes to describe, even in outline, it would not be of much use to the earthworm. But the motor answer follows the sensory stimulus almost instantaneously. The great advantage of establishing or enregistering these reflex chains is that the answers are practically ready-made or inborn, not requiring to be learned. It is not necessary that the brain should be stimulated if there is a brain; nor does the animal will to act, though in certain cases it may by means of higher controlling nerve-centres keep the natural reflex response from being given, as happens, for instance, when we control a cough or a sneeze on some solemn occasion. The evolutionary method, if we may use the expression, has been to enregister ready-made responses; and as we ascend the animal kingdom, we find reflex actions becoming complicated and often linked together, so that the occurrence of one pulls the[Pg 78] trigger of another, and so on in a chain. The behaviour of the insectivorous plant called Venus's fly-trap when it shuts on an insect is like a reflex action in an animal, but plants have no definite nervous system.

A somewhat higher level on the inclined plane is illustrated by what are called "tropisms," obligatory movements which the animal makes, adjusting its whole body so that physiological equilibrium results in relation to gravity, pressure, currents, moisture, heat, light, electricity, and surfaces of contact. A moth is flying past a candle; the eye next the light is more illumined than the other; a physiological inequilibrium results, affecting nerve-cells and muscle-cells; the outcome is that the moth automatically adjusts its flight so that both eyes become equally illumined; in doing this it often flies into the candle.

It may seem bad business that the moth should fly into the candle, but the flame is an utterly artificial item in its environment to which no one can expect it to be adapted. These tropisms play an important rôle in animal behaviour.

On a higher level is instinctive behaviour, which reaches such remarkable perfection in ants, bees, and wasps. In its typical expression instinctive behaviour depends on inborn capacities; it does not require to be learned; it is independent of practice or experience, though it may be improved by both; it is shared equally by all members of the species of the same sex (for the female's instincts are often different from the male's); it refers to particular conditions of life that are of vital importance, though they may occur only once in a lifetime. The female Yucca Moth emerges from the cocoon when the Yucca flower puts forth its bell-like blossoms. She flies to a flower, collects[Pg 79] some pollen from the stamens, kneads it into a pill-like ball, and stows this away under her chin. She flies to an older Yucca flower and lays her eggs in some of the ovules within the seed-box, but before she does so she has to deposit on the stigma the ball of pollen. From this the pollen-tubes grow down and the pollen-nucleus of a tube fertilises the egg-cell in an ovule, so that the possible seeds become real seeds, for it is only a fraction of them that the Yucca Moth has destroyed by using them as cradles for her eggs. Now it is plain that the Yucca Moth has no individual experience of Yucca flowers, yet she secures the continuance of her race by a concatenation of actions which form part of her instinctive repertory.

From a physiological point of view instinctive behaviour is like a chain of compound reflex actions, but in some cases, at least, there is reason to believe that the behaviour is suffused with awareness and backed by endeavour. This is suggested in exceptional cases where the stereotyped routine is departed from to meet exceptional conditions. It should also be noted that just as ants, hive bees, and wasps exhibit in most cases purely instinctive behaviour, but move on occasion on the main line of trial and error or of experimental initiative, so among birds and mammals the intelligent behaviour is sometimes replaced by instinctive routine. Perhaps there is no instinctive behaviour without a spice of intelligence, and no intelligent behaviour without an instinctive element. The old view that instinctive behaviour was originally intelligent, and that instinct is "lapsed intelligence," is a tempting one, and is suggested by the way in which habitual intelligent actions cease in the individual to require intelligent control, but it rests on the unproved hypothesis that the acquisitions of the individual can be entailed on the race. It is almost certain that instinct is on a line of evolution quite different from intelligence, and that it is nearer to the inborn inspirations of the calculating boy or the musical genius than to the plodding methods of intelligent learning.[Pg 80]

The higher reaches of the inclined plane of behaviour show intelligence in the strict sense. They include those kinds of behaviour which cannot be described without the suggestion that the animal makes some sort of perceptual inference, not only profiting by experience but learning by ideas. Such intelligent actions show great individual variability; they are plastic and adjustable in a manner rarely hinted at in connection with instincts where routine cannot be departed from without the creature being nonplussed; they are not bound up with particular circumstances as instinctive actions are, but imply an appreciative awareness of relations.

When there is an experimenting with general ideas, when there is conceptual as contrasted with perceptual inference, we speak of Reason, but there is no evidence of this below the level of man. It is not, indeed, always that we can credit man with rational conduct, but he has the possibility of it ever within his reach.

Animal instinct and intelligence will be illustrated in another part of this work. We are here concerned simply with the general question of the evolution of behaviour. There is a main line of tentative experimental behaviour both below and above the level of intelligence, and it has been part of the tactics of evolution to bring about the hereditary enregistration of capacities of effective response, the advantages being that the answers come more rapidly and that the creature is left free, if it chooses, for higher adventures.

There is no doubt as to the big fact that in the course of evolution animals have shown an increasing complexity and masterfulness of behaviour, that they have become at once more controlled and more definitely free agents, and that the inner aspect of the behaviour—experimenting, learning, thinking, feeling, and willing—has come to count for more and more.[Pg 81]

Mammals furnish a crowning instance of a trend of evolution which expresses itself at many levels—the tendency to bring forth the young at a well-advanced stage and to an increase of parental care associated with a decrease in the number of offspring. There is a British starfish called Luidia which has two hundred millions of eggs in a year, and there are said to be several millions of eggs in conger-eels and some other fishes. These illustrate the spawning method of solving the problem of survival. Some animals are naturally prolific, and the number of eggs which they sow broadcast in the waters allows for enormous infantile mortality and obviates any necessity for parental care.

But some other creatures, by nature less prolific, have found an entirely different solution of the problem. They practise parental care and they secure survival with greatly economised reproduction. This is a trend of evolution particularly characteristic of the higher animals. So much so that Herbert Spencer formulated the generalisation that the size and frequency of the animal family is inverse ratio to the degree of evolution to which the animal has attained.

Now there are many different methods of parental care which secure the safety of the young, and one of these is called viviparity. The young ones are not liberated from the parent until they are relatively well advanced and more or less able to look after themselves. This gives the young a good send-off in life, and their chances of death are greatly reduced. In other words, the animals that have varied in the direction of economised reproduction may keep their foothold in the struggle for existence if they have varied at the same time in the direction of parental care. In other cases it may have worked the other way round.

In the interesting archaic animal called Peripatus, which has[Pg 82] to face a modern world too severe for it, one of the methods of meeting the environing difficulties is the retention of the offspring for many months within the mother, so that it is born a fully-formed creature. There are only a few offspring at a time, and, although there are exceptional cases like the summer green-flies, which are very prolific though viviparous, the general rule is that viviparity is associated with a very small family. The case of flowering plants stands by itself, for although they illustrate a kind of viviparity, the seed being embryos, an individual plant may have a large number of flowers and therefore a huge family.

Viviparity naturally finds its best illustrations among terrestrial animals, where the risks to the young life are many, and it finds its climax among mammals.

Now it is an interesting fact that the three lowest mammals, the Duckmole and two Spiny Ant-eaters, lay eggs, i.e. are oviparous; that the Marsupials, on the next grade, bring forth their young, as it were, prematurely, and in most cases stow them away in an external pouch; while all the others—the Placentals—show a more prolonged ante-natal life and an intimate partnership between the mother and the unborn young.

There is another way of looking at the sublime process of evolution. It has implied a mastery of all the possible haunts of life; it has been a progressive conquest of the environment.

1. It is highly probable that living organisms found their foothold in the stimulating conditions of the shore of the sea—the shallow water, brightly illumined, seaweed-growing shelf fringing the Continents. This littoral zone was a propitious environment where sea and fresh water, earth and air all meet, where there is stimulating change, abundant oxygenation and a copious supply of nutritive material in what the streams bring down and in the rich seaweed vegetation.

[Pg 83]

It is not an easy haunt of life, but none the worse for that, and it is tenanted to-day by representatives of practically every class of animals from infusorians to seashore birds and mammals.

2. The open-sea or pelagic haunt includes all the brightly illumined surface waters beyond the shallow water of the shore area.

It is perhaps the easiest of all the haunts of life, for there is no crowding, there is considerable uniformity, and an abundance of food for animals is afforded by the inexhaustible floating "sea-meadows" of microscopic Algæ. These are reincarnated in minute animals like the open-sea crustaceans, which again are utilised by fishes, these in turn making life possible for higher forms like carnivorous turtles and toothed whales. It is quite possible that the open sea was the original cradle of life and perhaps Professor Church is right in picturing a long period of pelagic life before there was any sufficiently shallow water to allow the floating plants to anchor. It is rather in favour of this view that many shore animals such as crabs and starfishes, spend their youthful stages in the relatively safe cradle of the open sea, and only return to the more strenuous conditions of their birthplace after they have gained considerable strength of body. It is probably safe to say that the honour of being the original cradle of life lies between the shore of the sea and the open sea.

3. A third haunt of life is the floor of the Deep Sea, the abyssal area, which occupies more than a half of the surface of the globe. It is a region of extreme cold—an eternal winter; of utter darkness—an eternal night—relieved only by the fitful gleams of "phosphorescent" animals; of enormous pressure—2½ tons on[Pg 84] the square inch at a depth of 2,500 fathoms; of profound calm, unbroken silence, immense monotony. And as there are no plants in the great abysses, the animals must live on one another, and, in the long run, on the rain of moribund animalcules which sink from the surface through the miles of water. It seems a very unpromising haunt of life, but it is abundantly tenanted, and it gives us a glimpse of the insurgent nature of the living creature that the difficulties of the Deep Sea should have been so effectively conquered. It is probable that the colonising of the great abysses took place in relatively recent times, for the fauna does not include many very antique types. It is practically certain that the colonisation was due to littoral animals which followed the food-débris, millennium after millennium, further and further down the long slope from the shore.

4. A fourth haunt of life is that of the freshwaters, including river and lake, pond and pool, swamp and marsh. It may have been colonised by gradual migration up estuaries and rivers, or by more direct passage from the seashore into the brackish swamp. Or it may have been in some cases that partially landlocked corners of ancient seas became gradually turned into freshwater basins. The animal population of the freshwaters is very representative, and is diversely adapted to meet the characteristic contingencies—the risk of being dried up, the risk of being frozen hard in winter, and the risk of being left high and dry after floods or of being swept down to the sea.

5. The terrestrial haunt has been invaded age after age by contingents from the sea or from the freshwaters. We must recognise the worm invasion, which led eventually to the making of the fertile soil, the invasion due to air-breathing Arthropods,[Pg 85] which led eventually to the important linkage between flowers and their insect visitors, and the invasion due to air-breathing Amphibians, which led eventually to the higher terrestrial animals and to the development of intelligence and family affection. Besides these three great invasions, there were minor ones such as that leading to land-snails, for there has been a widespread and persistent tendency among aquatic animals to try to possess the dry land.

Getting on to dry land had a manifold significance.

It implied getting into a medium with a much larger supply of oxygen than there is dissolved in the water. But the oxygen of the air is more difficult to capture, especially when the skin becomes hard or well protected, as it is almost bound to become in animals living on dry ground. Thus this leads to the development of internal surfaces, such as those of lungs, where the oxygen taken into the body may be absorbed by the blood. In most animals the blood goes to the surface of oxygen-capture; but in insects and their relatives there is a different idea—of taking the air to the blood or in greater part to the area of oxygen-combustion, the living tissues. A system of branching air-tubes takes air into every hole and corner of the insect's body, and this thorough aeration is doubtless in part the secret of the insect's intense activity. The blood never becomes impure.

The conquest of the dry land also implied a predominance of that kind of locomotion which may be compared to punting, when the body is pushed along by pressing a lever against a hard substratum. And it also followed that with few exceptions the body of the terrestrial animal tended to be compact, readily lifted off the ground by the limbs or adjusted in some other way so that there may not be too large a surface trailing on the ground. An animal like a jellyfish, easily supported in the water, would be impossible on land. Such apparent exceptions as earthworms, centipedes, and snakes are not difficult to explain, for the earthworm[Pg 86] is a burrower which eats its way through the soil, the centipede's long body is supported by numerous hard legs, and the snake pushes itself along by means of the large ventral scales to which the lower ends of very numerous ribs are attached.

A great restriction attendant on the invasion of the dry land is that locomotion becomes limited to one plane, namely, the surface of the earth. This is in great contrast to what is true in the water, where the animal can move up or down, to right or to left, at any angle and in three dimensions. It surely follows from this that the movements of land animals must be rapid and precise, unless, indeed, safety is secured in some other way. Hence it is easy to understand why most land animals have very finely developed striped muscles, and why a beetle running on the ground has far more numerous muscles than a lobster swimming in the sea.

Land animals were also handicapped by the risks of drought and of frost, but these were met by defences of the most diverse description, from the hairs of woolly caterpillars to the fur of mammals, from the carapace of tortoises to the armour of armadillos. In other cases, it is hardly necessary to say, the difficulties may be met in other ways, as frogs meet the winter by falling into a lethargic state in some secluded retreat.

Another consequence of getting on to dry land is that the eggs or young can no longer be set free anyhow, as is possible when the animal is surrounded by water, which is in itself more or less of a cradle. If the eggs were laid or the young liberated on dry ground, the chances are many that they would be dried up or devoured. So there are numerous ways in which land animals secure the safety of their young, e.g. by burying them in the ground, or by hiding them in nests, or by carrying them about for a prolonged period either before or after birth. This may mean great safety for the young, this may make it possible to have[Pg 87] only a small family, and this may tend to the evolution of parental care and the kindly emotions. Thus it may be understood that from the conquest of the land many far-reaching consequences have followed.

Finally, it is worth dwelling on the risks of terrestrial life, because they enable us better to understand why so many land animals have become burrowers and others climbers of trees, why some have returned to the water and others have taken to the air. It may be asked, perhaps, why the land should have been colonised at all when the risks and difficulties are so great. The answer must be that necessity and curiosity are the mother and father of invention. Animals left the water because the pools dried up, or because they were overcrowded, or because of inveterate enemies, but also because of that curiosity and spirit of adventure which, from first to last, has been one of the spurs of progress.

6. The last great haunt of life is the air, a mastery of which must be placed to the credit of insects, Pterodactyls, birds, and bats. These have been the successes, but it should be noted that there have been many brilliant failures, which have not attained to much more than parachuting. These include the Flying Fishes, which take leaps from the water and are carried for many yards and to considerable heights, holding their enlarged pectoral fins taut or with little more than a slight fluttering. There is a so-called Flying Frog (Rhacophorus) that skims from branch to branch, and the much more effective Flying Dragon (Draco volans) of the Far East, which has been mentioned already. Among mammals there are Flying Phalangers, Flying Lemurs, and more besides, all attaining to great skill as parachutists, and illustrating the endeavour to master the air which man has realised in a way of his own.

The power of flight brings obvious advantages. A bird feeding[Pg 88] on the ground is able to evade the stalking carnivore by suddenly rising into the air; food and water can be followed rapidly and to great distances; the eggs or the young can be placed in safe situations; and birds in their migrations have made a brilliant conquest both of time and space. Many of them know no winter in their year, and the migratory flight of the Pacific Golden Plover from Hawaii to Alaska and back again does not stand alone.

How do we know when the various classes of animals and plants were established on the earth? How do we know the order of their appearance and the succession of their advances? The answer is: by reading the Rock Record. In the course of time the crust of the earth has been elevated into continents and depressed into ocean-troughs, and the surface of the land has been buckled up into mountain ranges and folded in gentler hills and valleys. The high places of the land have been weathered by air and water in many forms, and the results of the weathering have been borne away by rivers and seas, to be laid down again elsewhere as deposits which eventually formed sandstones, mudstones, and similar sedimentary rocks. Much of the material of the original crust has thus been broken down and worked up again many times over, and if the total thickness of the sedimentary rocks is added up it amounts, according to some geologists, to a total of 67 miles. In most cases, however, only a small part of this thickness is to be seen in one place, for the deposits were usually formed in limited areas at any one time.

When the sediments were accumulating age after age, it naturally came about that remains of the plants and animals living[Pg 89] at the time were buried, and these formed the fossils by the aid of which it is possible to read the story of the past. By careful piecing together of evidence the geologist is able to determine the order in which the different sedimentary rocks were laid down, and thus to say, for instance, that the Devonian period was the time of the origin of Amphibians. In other cases the geologist utilises the fossils in his attempt to work out the order of the strata when these have been much disarranged. For the simpler fossil forms of any type must be older than those that are more complex. There is no vicious circle here, for the general succession of strata is clear, and it is quite certain that there were fishes before there were amphibians, and amphibians before there were reptiles, and reptiles before there were birds and mammals. In certain cases, e.g. of fossil horses and elephants, the actual historical succession has been clearly worked out.

If the successive strata contained good samples of all the plants and animals living at the time when the beds were formed, then it would be easy to read the record of the rocks, but many animals were too soft to become satisfactory fossils, many were eaten or dissolved away, many were destroyed by heat and pressure, so that the rock record is like a library very much damaged by fire and looting and decay.

The long history of the earth and its inhabitants is conveniently divided into eras. Thus, just as we speak of the ancient, mediæval, and modern history of mankind, so we may speak of Palæozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras in the history of the earth as a whole.

Geologists cannot tell us except in an approximate way how long the process of evolution has taken. One of the methods is to estimate how long has been required for the accumulation of[Pg 90] the salts of the sea, for all these have been dissolved out of the rocks since rain began to fall on the earth. Dividing the total amount of saline matter by what is contributed every year in modern times, we get about a hundred million years as the age of the sea. But as the present rate of salt-accumulation is probably much greater than it was during many of the geological periods, the prodigious age just mentioned is in all likelihood far below the mark. Another method is to calculate how long it would take to form the sedimentary rocks, like sandstones and mudstones, which have a total thickness of over fifty miles, though the local thickness is rarely over a mile. As most of the materials have come from the weathering of the earth's crust, and as the annual amount of weathering now going on can be estimated, the time required for the formation of the sedimentary rocks of the world can be approximately calculated. There are some other ways of trying to tell the earth's age and the length of the successive periods, but no certainty has been reached.

The eras marked on the table (page 92) as before the Cambrian correspond to about thirty-two miles of thickness of strata; and all the subsequent eras with fossil-bearing rocks to a thickness of about twenty-one miles—in itself an astounding fact. Perhaps thirty million years must be allotted to the Pre-Cambrian eras, eighteen to the Palæozoic, nine to the Mesozoic, three to the Cenozoic, making a grand total of sixty millions.

It is an astounding fact that at least half of geological time (the Archæozoic and Proterozoic eras) passed before there were living creatures with parts sufficiently hard to form fossils. In the latter part of the Proterozoic era there are traces of one-celled marine animals (Radiolarians) with shells of flint, and of worms that wallowed in the primal mud. It is plain that as regards the most primitive creatures the rock record tells us little.

[Pg 91]

The rarity of direct traces of life in the oldest rocks is partly due to the fact that the primitive animals would be of delicate build, but it must also be remembered that the ancient rocks have been profoundly and repeatedly changed by pressure and heat, so that the traces which did exist would be very liable to obliteration. And if it be asked what right we have to suppose the presence of living creatures in the absence or extreme rarity of fossils, we must point to great accumulations of limestone which indicate the existence of calcareous algæ, and to deposits of iron which probably indicate the activity of iron-forming Bacteria. Ancient beds of graphite similarly suggest that green plants flourished in these ancient days.

The Cambrian period was the time of the establishment of the chief stocks of backboneless animals such as sponges, jellyfishes, worms, sea-cucumbers, lamp-shells, trilobites, crustaceans, and molluscs. There is something very eloquent in the broad fact that the peopling of the seas had definitely begun some thirty million years ago, for Professor H. F. Osborn points out that in the Cambrian period there was already a colonisation of the shore of the sea, the open sea, and the deep waters.

The Ordovician period was marked by abundant representation of the once very successful class of Trilobites—jointed-footed, antenna-bearing, segmented marine animals, with numerous appendages and a covering of chitin. They died away entirely with the end of the Palæozoic era. Also very notable was the abundance of predatory cuttlefishes, the bullies of the ancient seas. But it was in this period that the first backboned animals made their appearance—an epoch-making step in evolution. In other words, true fishes were evolved—destined in the course of ages to replace the cuttlefishes (which are mere molluscs) in dominating the seas.[Pg 92]

In the Silurian period in which the peopling of the seas went on apace, there was the first known attempt at colonising the dry land. For in Silurian rocks there are fossil scorpions, and that implies ability to breathe dry air—by means of internal surfaces, in this case known as lungbooks. It was also towards the end of the Silurian, when a period of great aridity set in, that fishes appeared related to our mud-fishes or double-breathers (Dipnoi), which have lungs as well as gills. This, again, meant utilising dry air, just as the present-day mud-fishes do when the water disappears from the pools in hot weather. The lung-fishes or mud-fishes of to-day are but three in number, one in Queensland, one in South America, and one in Africa, but they are extremely[Pg 93] interesting "living fossils," binding the class of fishes to that of amphibians. It is highly probable that the first invasion of the dry land should be put to the credit of some adventurous worms, but the second great invasion was certainly due to air-breathing Arthropods, like the pioneer scorpion we mentioned.

The Devonian period, including that of the Old Red Sandstone, was one of the most significant periods in the earth's history. For it was the time of the establishment of flowering plants upon the earth and of terrestrial backboned animals. One would like to have been the discoverer of the Devonian foot-print of Thinopus, the first known Amphibian foot-print—an eloquent vestige of the third great invasion of the dry land. It was probably from a stock of Devonian lung-fishes that the first Amphibians sprang, but it was not till the next period that they came to their own. While they were still feeling their way, there was a remarkable exuberance of shark-like and heavily armoured fishes in the Devonian seas.

The Carboniferous period was marked by a mild moist climate and a luxuriant vegetation in the swampy low grounds. It was a much less strenuous time than the Devonian period; it was like a very long summer. There were no trees of the type we see now, but there were forests of club-mosses and horsetails which grew to a gigantic size compared with their pigmy representatives of to-day. In these forests the jointed-footed invaders of the dry land ran riot in the form of centipedes, spiders, scorpions, and insects, and on these the primeval Amphibians fed. The appearance of insects made possible a new linkage of far-reaching importance, namely, the cross-fertilisation of flowering plants by their insect visitors, and from this time onwards it may be said that flowers and their visitors have evolved hand in hand.[Pg 94] Cross-fertilisation is much surer by insects than by the wind, and cross-fertilisation is more advantageous than self-fertilisation because it promotes both fertility and plasticity. It was probably in this period that coloured flowers—attractive to insect-visitors—began to justify themselves as beauty became useful, and began to relieve the monotonous green of the horsetail and club-moss forests, which covered great tracts of the earth for millions of years. In the Carboniferous forests there were also land-snails, representing one of the minor invasions of the dry land, tending on the whole to check vegetation. They, too, were probably preyed upon by the Amphibians, some of which attained a large size. Each age has had its giants, and those of the Carboniferous were Amphibians called Labyrinthodonts, some of which were almost as big as donkeys. It need hardly be said that it was in this period that most of the Coal-measures were laid down by the immense accumulation of the spores and debris of the club-moss forests. Ages afterwards, it was given to man to tap this great source of energy—traceable back to the sunshine of millions of years ago. Even then it was true that no plant or animal lives or dies to itself!

As Amphibians had their Golden Age in the Carboniferous period we may fitly use this opportunity of indicating the advances in evolution which the emergence of Amphibians implied. (1) In the first place the passage from water to dry land was the beginning of a higher and more promiseful life, taxed no doubt by increased difficulties. The natural question rises why animals should have migrated from water to dry land at all when great difficulties were involved in the transition. The answers must be: (a) that local drying up of water-basins or elevations of the land surface often made the old haunts untenable; (b) that there may have been great congestion and competition in the old quarters; and (c) that there has been an undeniable endeavour[Pg 95] after well-being throughout the history of animal life. In the same way with mankind, migrations were prompted by the setting in of prolonged drought, by over-population, and by the spirit of adventure. (2) In Amphibians for the first time the non-digitate paired fins of fishes were replaced by limbs with fingers and toes. This implied an advantageous power of grasping, of holding firm, of putting food into the mouth, of feeling things in three dimensions. (3) We cannot be positive in regard to the soft parts of the ancient Amphibians known only as fossils, but if they were in a general way like the frogs and toads, newts and salamanders of the present day, we may say that they made among other acquisitions the following: true ventral lungs, a three-chambered heart, a movable tongue, a drum to the ear, and lids to the eyes. It is very interesting to find that though the tongue of the tadpole has some muscle-fibres in it, they are not strong enough to effect movement, recalling the tongue of fishes, which has not any muscles at all. Gradually, as the tadpole becomes a frog, the muscle-fibres grow in strength, and make it possible for the full-grown creature to shoot out its tongue upon insects. This is probably a recapitulation of what was accomplished in the course of millennia in the history of the Amphibian race. (4) Another acquisition made by Amphibians was a voice, due, as in ourselves, to the rapid passage of air over taut membranes (vocal cords) stretched in the larynx. It is an interesting fact that for millions of years there was upon the earth no sound of life at all, only the noise of wind and wave, thunder and avalanche. Apart from the instrumental music of some insects, perhaps beginning in the Carboniferous, the first vital sounds were due to Amphibians, and theirs certainly was the first voice—surely one of the great steps in organic evolution.

The first use of the voice was probably that indicated by our frogs and toads—it serves as a sex-call. That is the meaning[Pg 96] of the trumpeting with which frogs herald the spring, and it is often only in the males that the voice is well developed. But if we look forward, past Amphibians altogether, we find the voice becoming a maternal call helping to secure the safety of the young—a use very obvious when young birds squat motionless at the sound of the parent's danger-note. Later on, probably, the voice became an infantile call, as when the unhatched crocodile pipes from within the deeply buried egg, signalling to the mother that it is time to be unearthed. Higher still the voice expresses emotion, as in the song of birds, often outside the limits of the breeding time. Later still, particular sounds become words, signifying particular things or feelings, such as "food," "danger," "home," "anger," and "joy." Finally words become a medium of social intercourse and as symbols help to make it possible for man to reason.

In the Permian period reptiles appeared, or perhaps one should say, began to assert themselves. That is to say, there was an emergence of backboned animals which were free from water and relinquished the method of breathing by gills, which Amphibians retained in their young stages at least. The unhatched or unborn reptile breathes by means of a vascular hood spread underneath the egg-shell and absorbing dry air from without. It is an interesting point that this vascular hood, called the allantois, is represented in the Amphibians by an unimportant bladder growing out from the hind end of the food-canal. A great step in evolution was implied in the origin of this ante-natal hood or fœtal membrane and another one—of protective significance—called the amnion, which forms a water-bag over the delicate embryo. The step meant total emancipation from the water and from gill-breathing, and the two fœtal membranes, the amnion and the allantois, persist not only in all reptiles but in birds and[Pg 97] mammals as well. These higher Vertebrates are therefore called Amniota in contrast to the Lower Vertebrates or Anamnia (the Amphibians, Fishes, and primitive types).

It is a suggestive fact that the embryos of all reptiles, birds, and mammals show gill-clefts—a tell-tale evidence of their distant aquatic ancestry. But these embryonic gill-clefts are not used for respiration and show no trace of gills except in a few embryonic reptiles and birds where their dwindled vestiges have been recently discovered. As to the gill-clefts, they are of no use in higher Vertebrates except that the first becomes the Eustachian tube leading from the ear-passage to the back of the mouth. The reason why they persist when only one is of any use, and that in a transformed guise, would be difficult to interpret except in terms of the Evolution theory. They illustrate the lingering influence of a long pedigree, the living hand of the past, the tendency that individual development has to recapitulate racial evolution. In a condensed and telescoped manner, of course, for what took the race a million years may be recapitulated by the individual in a week!

In the Permian period the warm moist climate of most of the Carboniferous period was replaced by severe conditions, culminating in an Ice Age which spread from the Southern Hemisphere throughout the world. With this was associated a waning of the Carboniferous flora, and the appearance of a new one, consisting of ferns, conifers, ginkgos, and cycads, which persisted until near the end of the Mesozoic era. The Permian Ice Age lasted for millions of years, and was most severe in the Far South. Of course, it was a very different world then, for North Europe was joined to North America, Africa to South America, and Australia to Asia. It was probably during the Permian Ice Age that many of the insects divided their life-history into two main chapters—the feeding, growing, moulting, immature, larval stages, e.g. caterpillars, and the more ascetic, non-growing, non-moulting, winged phase, adapted for reproduction. Between[Pg 98] these there intervened the quiescent, well-protected pupa stage or chrysalis, probably adapted to begin with as a means of surviving the severe winter. For it is easier for an animal to survive when the vital processes are more or less in abeyance.

We cannot leave the last period of the Palæozoic era and its prolonged ice age without noticing that it meant the entire cessation of a large number of ancient types, especially among plants and backboneless animals, which now disappear for ever. It is necessary to understand that the animals of ancient days stand in three different relations to those of to-day. (a) There are ancient types that have living representatives, sometimes few and sometimes many, sometimes much changed and sometimes but slightly changed. The lamp-shell, Lingulella, of the Cambrian and Ordovician period has a very near relative in the Lingula of to-day. There are a few extremely conservative animals. (b) There are ancient types which have no living representatives, except in the guise of transformed descendants, as the King-crab (Limulus) may be said to be a transformed descendant of the otherwise quite extinct race to which Eurypterids or Sea-scorpions belonged. (c) There are altogether extinct types—lost races—which have left not a wrack behind. For there is not any representation to-day of such races as Graptolites and Trilobites.

Looking backwards over the many millions of years comprised in the Palæozoic era, what may we emphasise as the most salient features? There was in the Cambrian the establishment of the chief classes of backboneless animals; in the Ordovician the first fishes and perhaps the first terrestrial plants; in the Silurian the emergence of air-breathing Invertebrates and mud-fishes; in the Devonian the appearance of the first Amphibians, from which all higher land animals are descended, and the establishment of a land flora; in the Carboniferous the great Club-moss forests[Pg 99] and an exuberance of air-breathing insects and their allies; in the Permian the first reptiles and a new flora.

In a broad way the Mesozoic era corresponds with the Golden Age of reptiles, and with the climax of the Conifer and Cycad flora, which was established in the Permian. But among the Conifers and Cycads our modern flowering plants were beginning to show face tentatively, just like birds and mammals among the great reptiles.

In the Triassic period the exuberance of reptilian life which marked the Permian was continued. Besides Turtles which still persist, there were Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs, Dinosaurs, and Pterosaurs, none of which lasted beyond the Mesozoic era. Of great importance was the rise of the Dinosaurs in the Triassic, for it is highly probable that within the limits of this vigorous and plastic stock—some of them bipeds—we must look for the ancestors of both birds and mammals. Both land and water were dominated by reptiles, some of which attained to gigantic size. Had there been any zoologist in those days, he would have been very sagacious indeed if he had suspected that reptiles did not represent the climax of creation.

The Jurassic period showed a continuance of the reptilian splendour. They radiated in many directions, becoming adapted to many haunts. Thus there were many Fish Lizards paddling in the seas, many types of terrestrial dragons stalking about on land, many swiftly gliding alligator-like forms, and the Flying Dragons which began in the Triassic attained to remarkable success and variety. Their wing was formed by the extension of a great fold of skin on the enormously elongated outermost[Pg 100] finger, and they varied from the size of a sparrow to a spread of over five feet. A soldering of the dorsal vertebræ as in our Flying Birds was an adaptation to striking the air with some force, but as there is not more than a slight keel, if any, on the breast-bone, it is unlikely that they could fly far. For we know from our modern birds that the power of flight may be to some extent gauged from the degree of development of the keel, which is simply a great ridge for the better insertion of the muscles of flight. It is absent, of course, in the Running Birds, like the ostrich, and it has degenerated in an interesting way in the burrowing parrot (Stringops) and a few other birds that have "gone back."

But the Jurassic is particularly memorable because its strata have yielded two fine specimens of the first known bird, Archæopteryx. These were entombed in the deposits which formed the fine-grained lithographic stones of Bavaria, and practically every bone in the body is preserved except the breast-bone. Even the feathers have left their marks with distinctness. This oldest known bird—too far advanced to be the first bird—was about the size of a crow and was probably of arboreal habits. Of great interest are its reptilian features, so pronounced that one cannot evade the evolutionist suggestion. It had teeth in both jaws, which no modern bird has; it had a long lizard-like tail, which no modern bird has; it had claws on three fingers, and a sort of half-made wing. That is to say, it does not show, what all modern birds show, a fusion of half the wrist-bones with the whole of the palm-bones, the well-known carpo-metacarpus bone which forms a basis for the longest pinions. In many reptiles, such as Crocodiles, there are peculiar bones running across the abdomen beneath the skin, the so-called "abdominal ribs," and it seems an eloquent detail to find these represented in Archæopteryx, the earliest known bird. No modern bird shows any trace of them.

[Pg 101]

There is no warrant for supposing that the flying reptiles or Pterodactyls gave rise to birds, for the two groups are on different lines, and the structure of the wings is entirely different. Thus the long-fingered Pterodactyl wing was a parachute wing, while the secret of the bird's wing has its centre in the feathers. It is highly probable that birds evolved from certain Dinosaurs which had become bipeds, and it is possible that they were for a time swift runners that took "flying jumps" along the ground. Thereafter, perhaps, came a period of arboreal apprenticeship during which there was much gliding from tree to tree before true flight was achieved. It is an interesting fact that the problem of flight has been solved four times among animals—by insects, by Pterodactyls, by birds, and by bats; and that the four solutions are on entirely different lines.

In the Cretaceous period the outstanding events included the waning of giant reptiles, the modernising of the flowering plants, and the multiplication of small mammals. Some of the Permian reptiles, such as the dog-toothed Cynodonts, were extraordinarily mammal-like, and it was probably from among them that definite mammals emerged in the Triassic. Comparatively little is known of the early Triassic mammals save that their back-teeth were marked by numerous tubercles on the crown, but they were gaining strength in the late Triassic when small arboreal insectivores, not very distant from the modern tree-shrews (Tupaia), began to branch out in many directions indicative of the great divisions of modern mammals, such as the clawed mammals, hoofed mammals, and the race of monkeys or Primates. In the Upper Cretaceous there was an exuberant "radiation" of mammals, adaptive to the conquest of all sorts of haunts, and this was vigorously continued in Tertiary times.

There is no difficulty in the fact that the earliest remains of definite mammals in the Triassic precede the first-known bird in the Jurassic. For although we usually rank mammals as higher than birds (being mammals ourselves, how could we do[Pg 102] otherwise?), there are many ways in which birds are pre-eminent, e.g. in skeleton, musculature, integumentary structures, and respiratory system. The fact is that birds and mammals are on two quite different tacks of evolution, not related to one another, save in having a common ancestry in extinct reptiles. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that the Jurassic Archæopteryx was the first bird in any sense except that it is the first of which we have any record. In any case it is safe to say that birds came to their own before mammals did.

Looking backwards, we may perhaps sum up what is most essential in the Mesozoic era in Professor Schuchert's sentence: "The Mesozoic is the Age of Reptiles, and yet the little mammals and the toothed birds are storing up intelligence and strength to replace the reptiles when the cycads and conifers shall give way to the higher flowering plants."

In the Eocene period there was a replacement of the small-brained archaic mammals by big-brained modernised types, and with this must be associated the covering of the earth with a garment of grass and dry pasture. Marshes were replaced by meadows and browsing by grazing mammals. In the spreading meadows an opportunity was also offered for a richer evolution of insects and birds.

During the Oligocene the elevation of the land continued, the climate became much less moist, and the grazing herds extended their range.

The Miocene was the mammalian Golden Age and there were crowning examples of what Osborn calls "adaptive radiation." That is to say, mammals, like the reptiles before them, conquer every haunt of life. There are flying bats, volplaning parachutists, climbers in trees like sloths and squirrels, quickly moving hoofed mammals, burrowers like the moles, freshwater[Pg 103] mammals, like duckmole and beaver, shore-frequenting seals and manatees, and open-sea cetaceans, some of which dive far more than full fathoms five. It is important to realise the perennial tendency of animals to conquer every corner and to fill every niche of opportunity, and to notice that this has been done by successive sets of animals in succeeding ages. Most notably the mammals repeat all the experiments of reptiles on a higher turn of the spiral. Thus arises what is called convergence, the superficial resemblance of unrelated types, like whales and fishes, the resemblance being due to the fact that the different types are similarly adapted to similar conditions of life. Professor H. F. Osborn points out that mammals may seek any one of the twelve different habitat-zones, and that in each of these there may be six quite different kinds of food. Living creatures penetrate everywhere like the overflowing waters of a great river in flood.

The Pliocene period was a more strenuous time, with less genial climatic conditions, and with more intense competition. Old land bridges were broken and new ones made, and the geographical distribution underwent great changes. Professor R. S. Lull describes the Pliocene as "a period of great unrest." "Many migrations occurred the world over, new competitions arose, and the weaker stocks began to show the effects of the strenuous life. One momentous event seems to have occurred in the Pliocene, and that was the transformation of the precursor of humanity into man—the culmination of the highest line of evolution."

The Pleistocene period was a time of sifting. There was a continued elevation of the continental masses, and Ice Ages set in, relieved by less severe interglacial times when the ice-sheets retreated northwards for a time. Many types, like the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the sabre-toothed tiger, the cave-lion,[Pg 104] and the cave-bear, became extinct. Others which formerly had a wide range became restricted to the Far North or were left isolated here and there on the high mountains, like the Snow Mouse, which now occurs on isolated Alpine heights above the snow-line. Perhaps it was during this period that many birds of the Northern Hemisphere learned to evade the winter by the sublime device of migration.

Looking backwards we may quote Professor Schuchert again:

In man and human society the story of evolution has its climax.

Man stands apart from animals in his power of building up general ideas and of using these in the guidance of his behaviour and the control of his conduct. This is essentially wrapped up with his development of language as an instrument of thought. Some animals have words, but man has language (Logos). Some animals show evidence of perceptual inference, but man often gets beyond this to conceptual inference (Reason). Many animals are affectionate and brave, self-forgetful and industrious, but man "thinks the ought," definitely guiding his conduct in the light of ideals, which in turn are wrapped up with the fact that he is "a social person."

Besides his big brain, which may be three times as heavy as[Pg 105] that of a gorilla, man has various physical peculiarities. He walks erect, he plants the sole of his foot flat on the ground, he has a chin and a good heel, a big forehead and a non-protrusive face, a relatively uniform set of teeth without conspicuous canines, and a relatively naked body.

But in spite of man's undeniable apartness, there is no doubt as to his solidarity with the rest of creation. There is an "all-pervading similitude of structure," between man and the Anthropoid Apes, though it is certain that it is not from any living form that he took his origin. None of the anatomical distinctions, except the heavy brain, could be called momentous. Man's body is a veritable museum of relics (vestigial structures) inherited from pre-human ancestors. In his everyday bodily life and in some of its disturbances, man's pedigree is often revealed. Even his facial expression, as Darwin showed, is not always human. Some fossil remains bring modern man nearer the anthropoid type.

It is difficult not to admit the ring of truth in the closing words of Darwin's Descent of Man:

There is another side of evolution so obvious that it is often overlooked, the tendency to link lives together in vital inter-relations. Thus flowers and their insect visitors are often vitally interlinked in mutual dependence. Many birds feed on berries and distribute the seeds. The tiny freshwater snail is the host of[Pg 106] the juvenile stages of the liver-fluke of the sheep. The mosquito is the vehicle of malaria from man to man, and the tse-tse fly spreads sleeping sickness. The freshwater mussel cannot continue its race without the unconscious co-operation of the minnow, and the freshwater fish called the bitterling cannot continue its race without the unconscious co-operation of the mussel. There are numerous mutually beneficial partnerships between different kinds of creatures, and other inter-relations where the benefit is one-sided, as in the case of insects that make galls on plants. There are also among kindred animals many forms of colonies, communities, and societies. Nutritive chains bind long series of animals together, the cod feeding on the whelk, the whelk on the worm, the worm on the organic dust of the sea. There is a system of successive incarnations and matter is continually passing from one embodiment to another. These instances must suffice to illustrate the central biological idea of the web of life, the interlinked System of Animate Nature. Linnæus spoke of the Systema Naturæ, meaning the orderly hierarchy of classes, orders, families, genera, and species; but we owe to Darwin in particular some knowledge of a more dynamic Systema Naturæ, the network of vital inter-relations. This has become more and more complex as evolution has continued, and man's web is most complex of all. It means making Animate Nature more of a unity; it means an external method of registering steps of progress; it means an evolving set of sieves by which new variations are sifted, and living creatures are kept from slipping down the steep ladder of evolution.

It sometimes happens that the inter-relation established between one living creature and another works in a retrograde direction. This is the case with many thoroughgoing internal parasites which have sunk into an easygoing kind of life, utterly dependent on their host for food, requiring no exertions, running[Pg 107] no risks, and receiving no spur to effort. Thus we see that evolution is not necessarily progressive; everything depends on the conditions in reference to which the living creatures have been evolved. When the conditions are too easygoing, the animal may be thoroughly well adapted to them—as a tapeworm certainly is—but it slips down the rungs of the ladder of evolution.

This is an interesting minor chapter in the story of evolution—the establishment of different kinds of parasites, casual and constant, temporary and lifelong, external hangers-on and internal unpaying boarders, those that live in the food-canal and depend on the host's food and those that inhabit the blood or the tissues and find their food there. It seems clear that ichneumon grubs and the like which hatch inside a caterpillar and eat it alive are not so much parasites as "beasts of prey" working from within.

But there are two sides to this minor chapter: there is the evolution of the parasite, and there is also the evolution of counteractive measures on the part of the host. Thus there is the maintenance of a bodyguard of wandering amœboid cells, which tackle the microbes invading the body and often succeed in overpowering and digesting them. Thus, again, there is the protective capacity the blood has of making antagonistic substances or "anti-bodies" which counteract poisons, including the poisons which the intruding parasites often make.

There has often been slipping back and degeneracy in the course of evolution, but the big fact is that there has been progress. For millions of years Life has been slowly creeping upwards, and if we compare the highest animals—Birds and Mammals—with their predecessors, we must admit that they[Pg 108] are more controlled, more masters of their fate, with more mentality. Evolution is on the whole integrative; that is to say, it makes against instability and disorder, and towards harmony and progress. Even in the rise of Birds and Mammals we can discern that the evolutionary process was making towards a fuller embodiment or expression of what Man values most—control, freedom, understanding, and love. The advance of animal life through the ages has been chequered, but on the whole it has been an advance towards increasing fullness, freedom, and fitness of life. In the study of this advance—the central fact of Organic Evolution—there is assuredly much for Man's instruction and much for his encouragement.

In all this, it may be said, the fact of evolution has been taken for granted, but what are the evidences? Perhaps it should be frankly answered that the idea of evolution, that the present is the child of the past and the parent of the future, cannot be proved as one may prove the Law of Gravitation. All that can be done is to show that it is a key—a way of looking at things—that fits the facts. There is no lock that it does not open.

But if the facts that the evolution theory vividly interprets be called the evidences of its validity, there is no lack of them. There is historical evidence; and what is more eloquent than the general fact that fishes emerge before amphibians, and these before reptiles, and these before birds, and so on? There are wonderfully complete fossil series, e.g. among cuttlefishes, in which we can almost see evolution in process. The pedigree of horse and elephant and crocodile is in general very convincing, though it is to be confessed that there are other cases in regard to which we have no light. Who can tell, for instance, how Vertebrates arose or from what origin?

There is embryological evidence, for the individual development[Pg 109] often reads like an abbreviated recapitulation of the presumed evolution of the race. The mammal's visceral clefts are tell-tale evidence of remote aquatic ancestors, breathing by gills. Something is known in regard to the historical evolution of antlers in bygone ages; the Red Deer of to-day recapitulates at least the general outlines of the history. The individual development of an asymmetrical flat-fish, like a plaice or sole, which rests and swims on one side, tells us plainly that its ancestors were symmetrical fishes.

There is what might be called physiological evidence, for many plants and animals are variable before our eyes, and evolution is going on around us to-day. This is familiarly seen among domesticated animals and cultivated plants, but there is abundant flux in Wild Nature. It need hardly be said that some organisms are very conservative, and that change need not be expected when a position of stable equilibrium has been secured.

There is also anatomical evidence of a most convincing quality. In the fore-limbs of backboned animals, say, the paddle of a turtle, the wing of a bird, the flipper of a whale, the fore-leg of a horse, and the arm of a man; the same essential bones and muscles are used to such diverse results! What could it mean save blood relationship? And as to the two sets of teeth in whalebone whales, which never even cut the gum, is there any alternative but to regard them as relics of useful teeth which ancestral forms possessed? In short, the evolution theory is justified by the way in which it works.

If it be said "So much for the fact of evolution, but what of the factors?" the answer is not easy. For not only is the problem the greatest of all scientific problems, but the inquiry is still very young. The scientific study of evolution[Pg 110] practically dates from the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859.

Heritable novelties or variations often crop up in living creatures, and these form the raw material of evolution. These variations are the outcome of expression of changes in the germ-cells that develop into organisms. But why should there be changes in the constitution of the germ-cells? Perhaps because the living material is very complex and inherently liable to change; perhaps because it is the vehicle of a multitude of hereditary items among which there are very likely to be reshufflings or rearrangements; perhaps because the germ-cells have very changeful surroundings (the blood, the body-cavity fluid, the sea-water); perhaps because deeply saturating outside influences, such as change of climate and habitat, penetrate through the body to its germ-cells and provoke them to vary. But we must be patient with the wearisome reiteration of "perhaps." Moreover, every many-celled organism reproduced in the usual way, arises from an egg-cell fertilised by a sperm-cell, and the changes involved in and preparatory to this fertilisation may make new permutations and combinations of the living items and hereditary qualities not only possible but necessary. It is something like shuffling a pack of cards, but the cards are living. As to the changes wrought on the body during its lifetime by peculiarities in nurture, habits, and surroundings, these dents or modifications are often very important for the individual, but it does not follow that they are directly important for the race, since it is not certain that they are transmissible.

Given a crop of variations or new departures or mutations, whatever the inborn novelties may be called, we have then to inquire how these are sifted. The sifting, which means the elimination of the relatively less fit variations and the selection of the relatively more fit, effected in many different ways in the course of the struggle for existence. The organism plays its new card in the game of life, and the consequences may determine[Pg 111] survival. The relatively less fit to given conditions will tend to be eliminated, while the relatively more fit will tend to survive. If the variations are hereditary and reappear, perhaps increased in amount, generation after generation, and if the process of sifting continue consistently, the result will be the evolution of the species. The sifting process may be helped by various forms of "isolation" which lessen the range of free intercrossing between members of a species, e.g. by geographical barriers. Interbreeding of similar forms tends to make a stable stock; out-breeding among dissimilars tends to promote variability. But for an outline like this it is enough to suggest the general method of organic evolution: Throughout the ages organisms have been making tentatives—new departures of varying magnitude—and these tentatives have been tested. The method is that of testing all things and holding fast that which is good.

(The following short list may be useful to readers who desire to have further books recommended to them.)

Clodd, Story of Creation: A Plain Account of Evolution.
Darwin, Origin of Species, Descent of Man.
Deperet, Transformation of the Animal World (Internat. Sci. Series).
Geddes and Thomson, Evolution (Home University Library).
Goodrich, Evolution (The People's Books).
Headley, Life and Evolution.
Hutchinson, H. Neville, Extinct Monsters (1892).
Lull, Organic Evolution.
McCabe, A B C of Evolution.
Metcalf, Outline of the Theory of Organic Evolution.
Osborn, H. F., The Evolution of Life (1921).
Thomson, Darwinism and Human Life.
Wallace, Darwinism.

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[Pg 115]

We saw in a previous chapter how the process of evolution led to a mastery of all the haunts of life. But it is necessary to return to these haunts or homes of animals in some detail, so as to understand the peculiar circumstances of each, and to see how in the course of ages of struggle all sorts of self-preserving and race-continuing adaptations or fitnesses have been wrought out and firmly established. Living creatures have spread over all the earth and in the waters under the earth; some of them have conquered the underground world and others the air. It is possible, however, as has been indicated, to distinguish six great haunts of life, each tenanted by a distinctive fauna, namely, the shore of the sea, the open sea, the depths of the sea, the freshwaters, the dry land, and the air. In the deep sea there are no plants at all; in the air the only plants are floating bacteria, though there is a sense in which a tree is very aerial, and the orchid perched on its branches still more so; in the other four haunts there is a flora as well as a fauna—the two working into one another's hands in interesting and often subtle inter-relations—the subject of a separate study.

By the shore of the sea the zoologist means much more than the narrow zone between tide-marks; he means the whole of the relatively shallow, well-illumined, seaweed-growing shelf around the continents and continental islands. Technically, this is called[Pg 116] the littoral area, and it is divisible into zones, each with its characteristic population. It may be noted that the green seaweeds are highest up on the shore; the brown ones come next; the beautiful red ones are lowest. All of them have got green chlorophyll, which enables them to utilise the sun's rays in photosynthesis (i.e. building up carbon compounds from air, water, and salts), but in the brown and red seaweeds the green pigment is masked by others. It is maintained by some botanists that these other pigments enable their possessors to make more of the scantier light in the deeper waters. However this may be, we must always think of the shore-haunt as the seaweed-growing area. Directly and indirectly the life of the shore animals is closely wrapped up with the seaweeds, which afford food and foothold, and temper the force of the waves. The minute fragments broken off from seaweeds and from the sea-grass (a flowering plant called Zostera) form a sort of nutritive sea-dust which is swept slowly down the slope from the shore, to form a very useful deposit in the quietness of deepish water. It is often found in the stomachs of marine animals living a long way offshore.

The littoral area as defined is not a large haunt of life; it occupies only about 9 million square miles, a small fraction of the 197,000,000 of the whole earth's surface. But it is a very long haunt, some 150,000 miles, winding in and out by bay and fiord, estuary and creek. Where deep water comes close to cliffs there may be no shore at all; in other places the relatively shallow water, with seaweeds growing over the bottom, may extend outwards for miles. The nature of the shore varies greatly according to the nature of the rocks, according to what the streams bring down from inland, and according to the jetsam that is brought in by the tides. The shore is a changeful place; there is, in the upper reaches, a striking difference between "tide in" and "tide out"; there are vicissitudes due to storms, to freshwater floods, to[Pg 117] wind-blown sand, and to slow changes of level, up and down. The shore is a very crowded haunt, for it is comparatively narrow, and every niche among the rocks may be precious.

It follows that the shore must be the scene of a keen struggle for existence—which includes all the answers-back that living creatures make to environing difficulties and limitations. There is struggle for food, accentuated by the fact that small items tend to be swept away by the outgoing tide or to sink down the slope to deep water. Apart from direct competition, e.g. between hungry hermit-crabs, it often involves hard work to get a meal. This is true even of apparently sluggish creatures. Thus the Crumb-of-Bread Sponge, or any other seashore sponge, has to lash large quantities of water through the intricate canal system of its body before it can get a sufficient supply of the microscopic organisms and organic particles on which it feeds. An index of the intensity of the struggle for food is afforded by the nutritive chains which bind animals together. The shore is almost noisy with the conjugation of the verb to eat in its many tenses. One pound of rock-cod requires for its formation ten pounds of whelk; one pound of whelk requires ten pounds of sea-worms; and one pound of worms requires ten pounds of sea-dust. Such is the circulation of matter, ever passing from one embodiment or incarnation to another.

Besides struggle for food there is struggle for foothold and for fresh air, struggle against the scouring tide and against the pounding breakers. The risk of dislodgment is often great and the fracture of limbs is a common accident. Of kinds of armour—the sea-urchin's hedgehog-like test, the crab's shard, the limpet's shell—there is great variety, surpassed only by that of weapons—the sea-anemone's stinging-cells, the sea-urchin's snapping-blades, the hermit-crab's forceps, the grappling tentacles and parrot's-beak jaws of the octopus.[Pg 118]

We get another glimpse of the intensity of the seashore struggle for existence in the frequency of "shifts for a living," adaptations of structure or of behaviour which meet frequently recurrent vicissitudes. The starfish is often in the dilemma of losing a limb or its life; by a reflex action it jettisons the captured arm and escapes. And what is lost is gradually regrown. The crab gets its leg broken past all mending; it casts off the leg across a weak breakage plane near the base, and within a preformed bandage which prevents bleeding a new leg is formed in miniature. Such is the adaptive device—more reflex than reflective—which is called self-mutilation or autotomy.

In another part of this book there is a discussion of camouflaging and protective resemblance; how abundantly these are illustrated on the shore! But there are other "shifts for a living." Some of the sand-hoppers and their relatives illustrate the puzzling phenomenon of "feigning death," becoming suddenly so motionless that they escape the eyes of their enemies. Cuttlefishes, by discharging sepia from their ink-bags, are able to throw dust in the eyes of their enemies. Some undisguised shore-animals, e.g. crabs, are adepts in a hide-and-seek game; some fishes, like the butterfish or gunnel, escape between stones where there seemed no opening and are almost uncatchable in their slipperiness. Subtlest of all, perhaps, is the habit some hermit-crabs have of entering into mutually beneficial partnership (commensalism) with sea-anemones, which mask their bearers and also serve as mounted batteries, getting transport as their reward and likewise crumbs from the frequently spread table. But enough has been said to show that the shore-haunt exhibits an extraordinary variety of shifts for a living.

According to Darwin, the struggle for existence, as a big fact in the economy of Animate Nature, includes not only competition[Pg 119] but all the endeavours which secure the welfare of the offspring, and give them a good send-off in life. So it is without a jolt that we pass from struggle for food and foothold to parental care. The marine leech called Pontobdella, an interesting greenish warty creature fond of fixing itself to skate, places its egg-cocoons in the empty shell of a bivalve mollusc, and guards them for weeks, removing any mud that might injure their development. We have seen a British starfish with its fully-formed young ones creeping about on its body, though the usual mode of development for shore starfishes is that the young ones pass through a free-swimming larval period in the open water. The father sea-spider carries about the eggs attached to two of his limbs; the father sea-horse puts his mate's eggs into his breast pocket and carries them there in safety until they are hatched; the father stickleback of the shore-pools makes a seaweed nest and guards the eggs which his wives are induced to lay there; the father lumpsucker mounts guard over the bunch of pinkish eggs which his mate has laid in a nook of a rocky shore-pool, and drives off intruders with zest. He also aerates the developing eggs by frequent paddling with his pectoral fins and tail, as the Scots name Cock-paidle probably suggests. It is interesting that the salient examples of parental care in the shore-haunt are mostly on the male parent's side. But there is maternal virtue as well.

The fauna of the shore is remarkably representative—from unicellular Protozoa to birds like the oyster-catcher and mammals like the seals. Almost all the great groups of animals have apparently served an apprenticeship in the shore-haunt, and since lessons learned for millions of years sink in and become organically enregistered, it is justifiable to look to the shore as a great school in which were gained racial qualities of endurance, patience, and alertness.

In great contrast to the narrow, crowded, difficult conditions of the shore-haunt (littoral area) are the spacious, bountiful, and[Pg 120] relatively easygoing conditions of the open sea (pelagic area), which means the well-lighted surface waters quite away from land. Many small organisms have their maximum abundance at about fifty fathoms, so that the word "surface" is to be taken generously. The light becomes very dim at 250 fathoms, and the open sea, as a zoological haunt, stops with the light. It is hardly necessary to say that the pelagic plants are more abundant near the surface, and that below a certain depth the population consists almost exclusively of animals. Not a few of the animals sink and rise in the water periodically; there are some that come near the surface by day, and others that come near the surface by night. Of great interest is the habit of the extremely delicate Ctenophores or "sea-gooseberries," which the splash of a wave would tear into shreds. Whenever there is any hint of a storm they sink beyond its reach, and the ocean's surface must have remained flat as a mirror for many hours before they can be lured upwards from the calm of their deep retreat.

To understand the vital economy of the open sea, we must recognise the incalculable abundance of minute unicellular plants, for they form the fundamental food-supply. Along with these must also be included numerous microscopic animals which have got possession of chlorophyll, or have entered into internal partnership with unicellular Algæ (symbiosis). These green or greenish plants and animals are the producers, using the energy of the sunlight to help them in building up carbon compounds out of air, water, and salts. The animals which feed on the producers, or on other animals, are the consumers. Between the two come those open-sea bacteria that convert nitrogenous material, e.g. from dead plants or animals that other bacteria have rotted, into forms, e.g. nitrates, which plants can re-utilise. The importance of these middlemen is great in keeping "the circulation of matter" agoing.

[Pg 121]

The "floating sea-meadows," as Sir John Murray called them, are always receiving contributions from inshore waters, where the conditions are favourable for the prolific multiplication of unicellular Algæ, and there is also a certain amount of non-living sea-dust always being swept out from the seaweed and sea-grass area.

The animals of the open sea are conveniently divided into the active swimmers (Nekton) and the more passive drifters (Plankton). The swimmers include whales great and small, such birds as the storm petrel, the fish-eating turtles and sea-snakes, such fishes as mackerel and herring, the winged snails or sea-butterflies on which whalebone whales largely feed, some of the active cuttles or squids, various open-sea prawns and their relatives, some worms like the transparent arrow-worm, and such active Protozoa as Noctiluca, whose luminescence makes the waves sparkle in the short summer darkness. Very striking as an instance of the insurgence of life are the sea-skimmers (Halobatidæ), wingless insects related to the water-measurers in the ditch. They are found hundreds of miles from land, skimming on the surface of the open sea, and diving in stormy weather. They feed on floating dead animals.

The drifters or easygoing swimmers—for there is no hard and fast line—are represented, for instance, by the flinty-shelled Radiolarians and certain of the chalk-forming animals (Globigerinid Foraminifera); by jellyfishes, swimming-bells, and Portuguese men-of-war; by the comb-bearers or Ctenophores; by legions of minute Crustaceans; by strange animals called Salps, related to the sedentary sea-squirts; and by some sluggish fishes like globe-fishes, which often float idly on the surface.

Open-sea animals tend to be delicately built, with a specific gravity near that of the sea-water, with adaptations, such as projecting filaments, which help flotation, and with capacities of[Pg 122] rising and sinking according to the surrounding conditions. Many of them are luminescent, and many of them are very inconspicuous in the water owing to their transparency or their bluish colour. In both cases the significance is obscure.

Hunger is often very much in evidence in the open sea, especially in areas where the Plankton is poor. For there is great diversity in this respect, most of the Mediterranean, for instance, having a scanty Plankton as compared with the North Sea. In the South Pacific, west of Patagonia, there is said to be an immense "sea desert" where there is little Plankton, and therefore little in the way of fishes. The success of fisheries in the North, e.g. on the Atlantic cod-banks, is due to the richness of the floating sea-meadows and the abundance of the smaller constituents of the animal Plankton.

Hunger is plain enough when the Baleen Whale rushes through the water with open jaws, engulfing in the huge cavern of its mouth, where the pendent whalebone plates form a huge sieve, incalculable millions of small fry.

But there is love as well as hunger in the open sea. The maternal care exhibited by the whale reaches a very high level, and the delicate shell of the female Paper Nautilus or Argonaut, in which the eggs and the young ones are sheltered, may well be described as "the most beautiful cradle in the world."

Besides the permanent inhabitants of the open sea, there are the larval stages of many shore-animals which are there only for a short time. For there is an interesting give and take between the shore-haunt and the open sea. From the shore come nutritive contributions and minute organisms which multiply quickly in the open waters. But not less important is the fact that the open waters afford a safe cradle or nursery for many a delicate larva, e.g. of crab and starfish, acorn-shell and sea-urchin, which could not survive for a day in the rough-and-tumble conditions of the[Pg 123] shore and the shallow water. After undergoing radical changes and gaining strength, the young creatures return to the shore in various ways.

Very different from all the other haunts are the depths of the sea, including the floor of the abysses and the zones of water near the bottom. This haunt, forever unseen, occupies more than a third of the earth's surface, and it is thickly peopled. It came into emphatic notice in connection with the mending of telegraph cables, but the results of the Challenger expedition (1873-6) gave the first impressive picture of what was practically a new world.

The average depth of the ocean is about two and a half miles; therefore, since many parts are relatively shallow, there must be enormous depths. A few of these, technically called "deeps," are about six miles deep, in which Mount Everest would be engulfed. There is enormous pressure in such depths; even at 2,500 fathoms it is two and a half tons on the square inch. The temperature is on and off the freezing-point of fresh water (28°-34° Fahr.), due to the continual sinking down of cold water from the Poles, especially from the South. Apart from the fitful gleams of luminescent animals, there is utter darkness in the deep waters. The rays of sunlight are practically extinguished at 250 fathoms, though very sensitive bromogelatine plates exposed at 500 fathoms have shown faint indications even at that depth. It is a world of absolute calm and silence, and there is no scenery on the floor. A deep, cold, dark, silent, monotonous world!

While some parts of the floor of the abysses are more thickly peopled than others, there is no depth limit to the distribution of[Pg 124] life. Wherever the long arm of the dredge has reached, animals have been found, e.g. Protozoa, sponges, corals, worms, starfishes, sea-urchins, sea-lilies, crustaceans, lamp-shells, molluscs, ascidians, and fishes—a very representative fauna. In the absence of light there can be no chlorophyll-possessing plants, and as the animals cannot all be eating one another there must be an extraneous source of food-supply. This is found in the sinking down of minute organisms which are killed on the surface by changes of temperature and other causes. What is left of them, before or after being swallowed, and of sea-dust and mineral particles of various kinds forms the diversified "ooze" of the sea-floor, a soft muddy precipitate, which is said to have in places the consistence of butter in summer weather.

There seems to be no bacteria in the abysses, so there can be no rotting. Everything that sinks down, even the huge carcase of a whale, must be nibbled away by hungry animals and digested, or else, in the case of most bones, slowly dissolved away. Of the whale there are left only the ear-bones, of the shark his teeth.

In adaptation to the great pressure the bodies of deep-sea animals are usually very permeable, so that the water gets through and through them, as in the case of Venus' Flower Basket, a flinty sponge which a child's finger would shiver. But when the pressure inside is the same as that outside nothing happens. In adaptation to the treacherous ooze, so apt to smother, many of the active deep-sea animals have very long, stilt-like legs, and many of the sedentary types are lifted into safety on the end of long stalks which have their bases embedded in the mud. In adaptation to the darkness, in which there is only luminescence that eyes could use, there is a great development of tactility. The interesting problem of luminescence will be discussed elsewhere.

As to the origin of the deep-sea fauna, there seems no doubt[Pg 125] that it has arisen by many contributions from the various shore-haunts. Following the down-drifting food, many shore-animals have in the course of many generations reached the world of eternal night and winter, and become adapted to its strange conditions. For the animals of the deep-sea are as fit, beautiful, and vigorous as those elsewhere. There are no slums in Nature.

Of the whole earth's surface the freshwaters form a very small fraction, about a hundredth, but they make up for their smallness by their variety. We think of deep lake and shallow pond, of the great river and the purling brook, of lagoon and swamp, and more besides. There is a striking resemblance in the animal population of widely separated freshwater basins: and this is partly because birds carry many small creatures on their muddy feet from one water-shed to another; partly because some of the freshwater animals are descended from types which make their way from the sea and the seashore through estuaries and marshes, and only certain kinds of constitution could survive the migration; and partly because some lakes are landlocked dwindling relics of ancient seas, and similar forms again would survive the change.

A typical assemblage of freshwater animals would include many Protozoa, like Amœbæ and the Bell-Animalcules, a representative of one family of sponges (Spongillidæ), the common Hydra, many unsegmented worms (notably Planarians and Nematodes), many Annelids related to the earthworms, many crustaceans, insects, and mites, many bivalves and snails, various fishes, a newt or two, perhaps a little mud-turtle or in warm countries a huge Crocodilian, various interesting birds like the water-ouzel or dipper, and mammals like the water-vole and the water-shrew.

Freshwater animals have to face certain difficulties, the greatest of which are drought, frost, and being washed away in[Pg 126] times of flood. There is no more interesting study in the world than an inquiry into the adaptations by which freshwater animals overcome the difficulties of the situation. We cannot give more than a few illustrations.

(1) Drought is circumvented by the capacity that many freshwater animals have of lying low and saying nothing. Thus the African mudfish may spend half the year encased in the mud, and many minute crustaceans can survive being dried up for years. (2) Escape from the danger of being frozen hard in the pool is largely due to the almost unique property of water that it expands as it approaches the freezing-point. Thus the colder water rises to the surface and forms or adds to the protecting blanket of ice. The warmer water remains unfrozen at the bottom, and the animals live on. (3) The risk of being washed away, e.g. to the sea, is lessened by all sorts of gripping, grappling, and anchoring structures, and by shortening the juvenile stages when the risks are greatest.

Over and over again in the history of animal life there have been attempts to get out of the water on to terra firma, and many of these have been successful, notably those made (1) by worms, (2) by air-breathing Arthropods, and (3) by amphibians.

In thinking of the conquest of the dry land by animals, we must recognise the indispensable rôle of plants in preparing the way. The dry ground would have proved too inhospitable had not terrestrial plants begun to establish themselves, affording food, shelter, and humidity. There had to be plants before there could be earthworms, which feed on decaying leaves and the like, but how soon was the debt repaid when the earthworms began their worldwide task of forming vegetable mould, opening up the earth with their burrows, circulating the soil by means of their castings, and bruising the particles in their gizzard—certainly the most important mill in the world.[Pg 127]

Another important idea is that littoral haunts, both on the seashore and in the freshwaters, afforded the necessary apprenticeship and transitional experience for the more strenuous life on dry land. Much that was perfected on land had its beginnings on the shore. Let us inquire, however, what the passage from water to dry land actually implied. This has been briefly discussed in a previous article (on Evolution), but the subject is one of great interest and importance.

Leaving the water for dry land implied a loss in freedom of movement, for the terrestrial animal is primarily restricted to the surface of the earth. Thus it became essential that movements should be very rapid and very precise, needs with which we may associate the acquisition of fine cross-striped, quickly contracting muscles, and also, in time, their multiplication into very numerous separate engines. We exercise fifty-four muscles in the half-second that elapses between raising the heel of our foot in walking and planting it firmly on the ground again. Moreover, the need for rapid precisely controlled movements implied an improved nervous system, for the brain was a movement-controlling organ for ages before it did much in the way of thinking. The transition to terra firma also involved a greater compactness of body, so that there should not be too great friction on the surface. An animal like the jellyfish is unthinkable on land, and the elongated bodies of some land animals like centipedes and snakes are specially adapted so that they do not "sprawl." They are exceptions that prove the rule.

Getting on to dry land meant entering a kingdom where the differences between day and night, between summer and winter are more felt than in the sea. This made it advantageous to have protections against evaporation and loss of heat and other such dangers. Hence a variety of ways in which the surface of the body acquired a thickened skin, or a dead cuticle, or a shell, or a[Pg 128] growth of hair, and so forth. In many cases there is an increase of the protection before the winter sets in, e.g. by growing thicker fur or by accumulating a layer of fat below the skin.

But the thickening or protection of the skin involved a partial or total loss of the skin as a respiratory surface. There is more oxygen available on dry land than in the water, but it is not so readily captured. Thus we see the importance of moist internal surfaces for capturing the oxygen which has been drawn into the interior of the body into some sort of lung. A unique solution was offered by Tracheate Arthropods, such as Peripatus, Centipedes, Millipedes, and Insects, where the air is carried to every hole and corner of the body by a ramifying system of air-tubes or tracheæ. In most animals the blood goes to the air, in insects the air goes to the blood. In the Robber-Crab, which has migrated from the shore inland, the dry air is absorbed by vascular tufts growing under the shelter of the gill-cover.

The problem of disposing of eggs or young ones is obviously much more difficult on land than in the water. For the water offers an immediate cradle, whereas on the dry land there were many dangers, e.g. of drought, extremes of temperature, and hungry sharp-eyed enemies, which had to be circumvented. So we find all manner of ways in which land animals hide their eggs or their young ones in holes and nests, on herbs and on trees. Some carry their young ones about after they are born, like the Surinam toad and the kangaroo, while others have prolonged the period of ante-natal life during which the young ones develop in safety within their mother, and in very intimate partnership with her in the case of the placental mammals. It is very interesting to find that the pioneer animal called Peripatus, which bridges the gap between worms and insects, carries its young for almost a year before birth.

Enough has been said to show that the successive conquests of the dry land had great evolutionary results. It is hardly too much to say that the invasion which the Amphibians led was the[Pg 129] beginning of better brains, more controlled activities, and higher expressions of family life.

There are no animals thoroughly aerial, but many insects spend much of their adult life in the free air, and the swift hardly pauses in its flight from dawn to dusk of the long summer day, alighting only for brief moments at the nest to deliver insects to the young. All the active life of bats certainly deserves to be called aerial.

The air was the last haunt of life to be conquered, and it is interesting to inquire what the conquest implied. (1) It meant transcending the radical difficulty of terrestrial life which confines the creatures of the dry land to moving on one plane, the surface of the earth. But the power of flight brought its possessors back to the universal freedom of movement which water animals enjoy. When we watch a sparrow rise into the air just as the cat has completed her stealthy stalking, we see that flight implies an enormous increase of safety. (2) The power of flight also opened up new possibilities of following the prey, of exploring new territories, of prospecting for water. (3) Of great importance too was the practicability of placing the eggs and the young, perhaps in a nest, in some place inaccessible to most enemies. When one thinks of it, the rooks' nests swaying on the tree-tops express the climax of a brilliant experiment. (4) The crowning advantage was the possibility of migrating, of conquering time (by circumventing the arid summer and the severe winter) and of conquering space (by passing quickly from one country to another and sometimes almost girdling the globe). There are not many acquisitions that have meant more to their possessors than the power of flight. It was a key opening the doors of a new freedom.

The problem of flight, as has been said in a previous chapter,[Pg 130] has been solved four times, and the solution has been different in each case. The four solutions are those offered by insects, extinct Pterodactyls, birds, and bats. Moreover, as has been pointed out, there have been numerous attempts at flight which remain glorious failures, notably the flying fishes, which take a great leap and hold their pectoral fins taut; the Flying Tree-Toad, whose webbed fingers and toes form a parachute; the Flying Lizard (Draco volans), which has its skin pushed out on five or six greatly elongated mobile ribs; and various "flying" mammals, e.g. Flying Phalangers and Flying Squirrels, which take great swooping leaps from tree to tree.

The wings of an insect are hollow flattened sacs which grow out from the upper parts of the sides of the second and third rings of the region called the thorax. They are worked by powerful muscles, and are supported, like a fan, by ribs of chitin, which may be accompanied by air-tubes, blood-channels, and nerves. The insect's body is lightly built and very perfectly aerated, and the principle of the insect's flight is the extremely rapid striking of the air by means of the lightly built elastic wings. Many an insect has over two hundred strokes of its wings in one second. Hence, in many cases, the familiar hum, comparable on a small scale to that produced by the rapidly revolving blades of an aeroplane's propeller. For a short distance a bee can outfly a pigeon, but few insects can fly far, and they are easily blown away or blown back by the wind. Dragon-flies and bees may be cited as examples of insects that often fly for two or three miles. But this is exceptional, and the usual shortness of insect flight is an important fact for man since it limits the range of insects like house-flies and mosquitoes which are vehicles of typhoid fever and malaria respectively. The most primitive insects (spring-tails and bristle-tails) show no trace of wings, while fleas and lice have become secondarily wingless. It is interesting to notice that some insects only fly once in their lifetime, namely, in connection with mating. The evolution of the insect's wing remains quite[Pg 131] obscure, but it is probable that insects could run, leap, and parachute before they could actually fly.

The extinct Flying Dragons or Pterodactyls had their golden age in the Cretaceous era, after which they disappeared, leaving no descendants. A fold of skin was spread out from the sides of the body by the enormously elongated outermost finger (usually regarded as corresponding to our little finger); it was continued to the hind-legs and thence to the tail.

It is unlikely that the Pterodactyls could fly far, for they have at most a weak keel on their breast-bone; on the other hand, some of them show a marked fusion of dorsal vertebræ, which, as in flying birds, must have served as a firm fulcrum for the stroke of the wings. The quaint creatures varied from the size of a sparrow up to a magnificent spread of 15-20 feet from tip to tip of the wings. They were the largest of all flying creatures.

The bird's solution of the problem of flight, which will be discussed separately, is centred in the feather, which forms a coherent vane for striking the air. In Pterodactyl and bat the wing is a web-wing or patagium, and a small web is to be seen on the front side of the bird's wing. But the bird's patagium is unimportant, and the bird's wing is on an evolutionary tack of its own—a fore-limb transformed for bearing the feathers of flight. Feathers are in a general way comparable to the scales of reptiles, but only in a general way, and no transition stage is known between the two. Birds evolved from a bipedal Dinosaur stock, as has been noticed already, and it is highly probable that they began their ascent by taking running leaps along the ground, flapping their scaly fore-limbs, and balancing themselves in kangaroo-like fashion with an extended tail. A second chapter was probably an arboreal apprenticeship, during which they made a fine art of parachuting—a persistence of which is to be seen in the pigeon "gliding" from the dovecot to the ground. It is in birds that the mastery of the air reaches its climax, and the mysterious "sailing" of the albatross and the vulture is surely the most[Pg 132] remarkable locomotor triumph that has ever been achieved. Without any apparent stroke of the wings, the bird sails for half an hour at a time with the wind and against the wind, around the ship and in majestic spirals in the sky, probably taking advantage of currents of air of different velocities, and continually changing energy of position into energy of motion as it sinks, and energy of motion into energy of position as it rises. It is interesting to know that some dragon-flies are also able to "sail."

The web-wing of bats involves much more than the fore-arm. The double fold of skin begins on the side of the neck, passes along the front of the arm, skips the thumb, and is continued over the elongated palm-bones and fingers to the sides of the body again, and to the hind-legs, and to the tail if there is a tail. It is interesting to find that the bones of the bat's skeleton tend to be lightly built as in birds, that the breast-bone has likewise a keel for the better insertion of the pectoral muscles, and that there is a solidifying of the vertebræ of the back, affording as in birds a firm basis for the wing action. Such similar adaptations to similar needs, occurring in animals not nearly related to one another, are called "convergences," and form a very interesting study. In addition to adaptations which the bat shares with the flying bird, it has many of its own. There are so many nerve-endings on the wing, and often also on special skin-leaves about the ears and nose, that the bat flying in the dusk does not knock against branches or other obstacles. Some say that it is helped by the echoes of its high-pitched voice, but there is no doubt as to its exquisite tactility. That it usually produces only a single young one at a time is a clear adaptation to flight, and similarly the sharp, mountain-top-like cusps on the back teeth are adapted in insectivorous bats for crunching insects.

Whether we think of the triumphant flight of birds, reaching a climax in migration, or of the marvel that a creature of the earth—as a mammal essentially is—should evolve such a mastery of the air as we see in bats, or even of the repeated but[Pg 133] splendid failures which parachuting animals illustrate, we gain an impression of the insurgence of living creatures in their characteristic endeavour after fuller well-being.

We have said enough to show how well adapted many animals are to meet the particular difficulties of the haunt which they tenant. But difficulties and limitations are ever arising afresh, and so one fitness follows on another. It is natural, therefore, to pass to the frequent occurrence of protective resemblance, camouflage, and mimicry—the subject of the next article.

Elmhirst, R., Animals of the Shore.
Flattely and Walton, The Biology of the Shore (1921).
Furneaux, Life of Ponds and Streams.
Hickson, S. J., Story of Life in the Seas and Fauna of the Deep Sea.
Johnstone, J., Life in the Sea (Cambridge Manual of Science).
Miall, L. C., Aquatic Insects.
Murray, Sir John, The Ocean (Home University Library).
Murray, Sir John and Hjort, Dr. J., The Depths of the Ocean.
Newbigin, M. I., Life by the Sea Shore.
Pycraft, W. P., History of Birds.
Scharff, R. F., History of the European Fauna (Contemp. Sci. Series).
Thomson, J. Arthur, The Wonder of Life (1914) and The Haunts of Life (1921).

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For every animal one discovers when observing carefully, there must be ten unseen. This is partly because many animals burrow in the ground or get in underneath things and into dark corners, being what is called cryptozoic or elusive. But it is partly because many animals put on disguise or have in some way acquired a garment of invisibility. This is very common among animals, and it occurs in many forms and degrees. The reason why it is so common is because the struggle for existence is often very keen, and the reasons why the struggle for existence is keen are four. First, there is the tendency to over-population in many animals, especially those of low degree. Second, there is the fact that the scheme of nature involves nutritive chains or successive incarnations, one animal depending upon another for food, and all in the long run on plants; thirdly, every vigorous animal is a bit of a hustler, given to insurgence and sticking out his elbows. There is a fourth great reason for the struggle for existence, namely, the frequent changefulness of the physical environment, which forces animals to answer back or die; but the first three reasons have most to do with the very common assumption of some sort of disguise. Even when an animal is in no sense a weakling, it may be very advantageous for it to be inconspicuous when it is resting or when it is taking care of its young. Our problem is the evolution of elusiveness, so far at least as that depends on likeness to surroundings, on protective resemblance to other objects, and in its highest reaches on true mimicry.[Pg 138]

Many animals living on sandy places have a light-brown colour, as is seen in some lizards and snakes. The green lizard is like the grass and the green tree-snake is inconspicuous among the branches. The spotted leopard is suited to the interrupted light of the forest, and it is sometimes hard to tell where the jungle ends and the striped tiger begins. There is no better case than the hare or the partridge sitting a few yards off on the ploughed field. Even a donkey grazing in the dusk is much more readily heard than seen.

The experiment has been made of tethering the green variety of Praying Mantis on green herbage, fastening them with silk threads. They escape the notice of birds. The same is true when the brown variety is tethered on withered herbage. But if the green ones are put on brown plants, or the brown ones on green plants, the birds pick them off. Similarly, out of 300 chickens in a field, 240 white or black and therefore conspicuous, 60 spotted and inconspicuous, 24 were soon picked off by crows, but only one of these was spotted. This was not the proportion that there should have been if the mortality had been fortuitous. There is no doubt that it often pays an animal to be like its habitual surroundings, like a little piece of scenery if the animal is not moving. It is safe to say that in process of time wide departures from the safest coloration will be wiped out in the course of Nature's ceaseless sifting.

But we must not be credulous, and there are three cautions to be borne in mind. (1) An animal may be very like its surroundings without there being any protection implied. The arrow-worms in the sea are as clear as glass, and so are many open-sea animals. But this is because their tissues are so watery, with a specific gravity near that of the salt water. And the invisibility does not save them, always or often, from being swallowed by larger animals that gather the harvest of the sea. (2) Among the cleverer animals it looks as if the creature sometimes sought out a spot where it was most inconspicuous. A spider may place itself[Pg 139] in the middle of a little patch of lichen, where its self-effacement is complete. Perhaps it is more comfortable as well as safer to rest in surroundings the general colour of which is like that of the animal's body. (3) The fishes that live among the coral-reefs are startling in their brilliant coloration, and there are many different patterns. To explain this it has been suggested that these fishes are so safe among the mazy passages and endless nooks of the reefs, that they can well afford to wear any colour that suits their constitution. In some cases this may be true, but naturalists who have put on a diving suit and walked about among the coral have told us that each kind of fish is particularly suited to some particular place, and that some are suited for midday work and others for evening work. Sometimes there is a sort of Box and Cox arrangement by which two different fishes utilise the same corner at different times.

The common shore-crab shows many different colours and mottlings, especially when it is young. It may be green or grey, red or brown, and so forth, and it is often in admirable adjustment to the colour of the rock-pool where it is living. Experiments, which require extension, have shown that when the crab has moulted, which it has to do very often when it is young, the colour of the new shell tends to harmonise with the general colour of the rocks and seaweed. How this is brought about, we do not know. The colour does not seem to change till the next moult, and not then unless there is some reason for it. A full-grown shore-crab is well able to look after itself, and it is of interest to notice, therefore, that the variety of coloration is mainly among the small individuals, who have, of course, a much less secure position. It is possible, moreover, that the resemblance to the surroundings admits of more successful hunting, enabling the small crab to take its victim unawares.[Pg 140]

Professor Poulton's experiments with the caterpillars of the small tortoise-shell butterfly showed that in black surroundings the pupæ tend to be darker, in white surroundings lighter, in gilded boxes golden; and the same is true in other cases. It appears that the surrounding colour affects the caterpillars through the skin during a sensitive period—the twenty hours immediately preceding the last twelve hours of the larval state. The result will tend to make the quiescent pupæ less conspicuous during the critical time of metamorphosis. The physiology of this sympathetic colouring remains obscure.

The ptarmigan moults three times in the year. Its summer plumage is rather grouselike above, with a good deal of rufous brown; the back becomes much more grey in autumn; almost all the feathers of the winter plumage are white. That is to say, they develop without any pigment and with numerous gas-bubbles in their cells. Now there can be no doubt that this white winter plumage makes the ptarmigan very inconspicuous amidst the snow. Sometimes one comes within a few feet of the crouching bird without seeing it, and this garment of invisibility may save it from the hungry eyes of golden eagles.

Similarly the brown stoat becomes the white ermine, mainly by the growth, of a new suit of white fur, and the same is true of the mountain hare. The ermine is all white except the black tip of its tail; the mountain hare in its winter dress is all white save the black tips of its ears. In some cases, especially in the mountain hare, it seems that individual hairs may turn white, by a loss of pigment, as may occur in man. According to Metchnikoff, the wandering amœboid cells of the body, called phagocytes, may creep up into the hairs and come back again with microscopic burdens of pigment. The place of the pigment is taken by gas-bubbles, and that is what causes the whiteness. In no animals is there any white pigment; the white colour is like that of snow or[Pg 141] foam, it is due to the complete reflection of the light from innumerable minute surfaces of crystals or bubbles.

The mountain hare may escape the fox the more readily because its whiteness makes it so inconspicuous against a background of snow; and yet, at other times, we have seen the creature standing out like a target on the dark moorland. So it cuts both ways. The ermine has almost no enemies except the gamekeeper, but its winter whiteness may help it to sneak upon its victims, such as grouse or rabbit, when there is snow upon the ground. In both cases, however, the probability is that the constitutional rhythm which leads to white hair in winter has been fostered and fixed for a reason quite apart from protection. The fact is that for a warm-blooded creature, whether bird or mammal, the physiologically best dress is a white one, for there is less radiation of the precious animal heat from white plumage or white pelage than from any other colour. The quality of warm-bloodedness is a prerogative of birds and mammals, and it means that the body keeps an almost constant temperature, day and night, year in and year out. This is effected by automatic internal adjustments which regulate the supply of heat, chiefly from the muscles, to the loss of heat, chiefly through the skin and from the lungs. The chief importance of this internal heat is that it facilitates the smooth continuance of the chemical processes on which life depends. If the temperature falls, as in hibernating mammals (whose warm-bloodedness is imperfect), the rate of the vital process is slowed down—sometimes dangerously. Thus we see how the white coat helps the life of the creature.

Bony flat-fishes, like plaice and sole, have a remarkable power of adjusting their hue and pattern to the surrounding gravel and sand, so that it is difficult to find them even when we know that they are there. It must be admitted that they[Pg 142] are also very quick to get a sprinkling of sand over their upturned side, so that only the eyes are left showing. But there is no doubt as to the exactness with which they often adjust themselves to be like a little piece of the substratum on which they lie; they will do this within limits in experimental conditions when they are placed on a quite artificial floor. As these fishes are very palatable and are much sought after by such enemies as cormorants and otters, it is highly probably that their power of self-effacement often saves their life. And it may be effected within a few minutes, in some cases within a minute.