The Outline of Science, Volume 1 quotes

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.

… 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Showing the rings, mighty swarms of meteorites.

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 "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.

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 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.

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.

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, a long-drawn-out sublime process like a great piece of music.

Greatest of naturalists, who made the idea of evolution current intellectual coin, and in his Origin of Species (1859) made the whole world new.

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.

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.

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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 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.

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;

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 …

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.

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 life. Wherever the long arm of the dredge has reached, animals have been found, e.g.

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.

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.

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.

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 beginning of better brains, more controlled activities, and higher expressions of family life.

ALBATROSS: A CHARACTERISTIC PELAGIC BIRD OF THE SOUTHERN SEA

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, 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.

… coral-snakes, cobras, brightly coloured tree-frogs are obtrusive rather than elusive, and the theory of Alfred Russel Wallace was that the flaunting conspicuousness serves as a useful advertisement, impressing itself on the memories of inexperienced enemies, who soon learn to leave creatures with "warning colours" alone.

In any case it is plain that an animal which is as safe as a wasp or a coral-snake can afford to wear any suit of clothes it likes.

There are buttons on the back of the waist of the morning coat to which the tails of the coat used to be fastened up, and there are buttons, occasionally with buttonholes, at the wrist which were once useful in turning up the sleeve.

The same is true of man's body, which is a veritable museum of relics.

Some anatomists have made out a list of over a hundred of these vestigial structures, and though this number is perhaps too high, there is no doubt that the list is long.

… any case, we have to try to square our views with the facts, not the facts with our views, and while one of the facts is that man stands unique and apart, the other is that man is a scion of a progressive simian stock.

Naturalists have exposed the pit whence man has been digged and the rock whence he has been hewn, but it is surely a heartening encouragement to know that it is an ascent, not a descent, that we have behind us.

There is wisdom in Pascal's maxim:

the prolongation of infancy would help to educate the parents in gentleness; the strengthening of the feeling of kinship would favour the evolution of family and social life—of which there are many anticipations at lower levels.

There is much truth in the saying: "Man did not make society, society made man."

A continuation of the story will deal with the emergence of the primitive types of man and the gradual ascent of the modern species.

… of the human brain is limited—there are large areas to which we can assign no definite function—we may rest assured that a brain which was shaped in a mould so similar to our own was one which responded to the outside world as ours does.

Piltdown man saw, heard, felt, thought, and dreamt much as we do still.

And this was 150,000 years ago at a modern estimate, and some would say half a million.

But they too were left behind, and the main line gave off other experiments—indications of which we know in Java, at Heidelberg, in the Neanderthal, and at Piltdown. None of these lasted or was made perfect.

They represent tentative men who had their day and ceased to be, our predecessors rather than our ancestors.

Still, the main stem goes on evolving, and who will be bold enough to say what fruit it has yet to bear!

None of these lasted or was made perfect. They represent tentative men who had their day and ceased to be, our predecessors rather than our ancestors.

Still, the main stem goes on evolving, and who will be bold enough to say what fruit it has yet to bear!

After a model by J. H. McGregor.

The only shadow on the story of achievement is that there seems to be no return from the spawning. There is little doubt that death is the nemesis of their reproduction. In any case, no adult eel ever comes back from the deep sea.

We are minded of Goethe's hard saying: "Death is Nature's expert advice to get plenty of life."

There is a well-known mudfish of Australia, Neoceratodus by name, which has turned its swim-bladder into a lung and comes to the surface to spout. It expels vitiated air with considerable force and takes fresh gulps.

In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the enregistered instinctive capacities work well, and the advantage of their becoming stereotyped was to leave the animal more free for adventures at a higher level.

Being "a slave of instinct" may give the animal a security that enables it to discover some new home or new food or new joy.

Somewhat in the same way, a man of methodical habits, which he has himself established, may gain leisure to make some new departure of racial profit.

The secretion of the glue probably came about as a pathological variation; its utilisation was perhaps discovered by accident; the types that had wit enough to take advantage of this were most successful; the routine became enregistered hereditarily.

The stickleback is not so clever as it looks.

But it was largely a matter of habituation, the outcome of careful and prolonged training. The elephant was laboriously taught to put the penny in the slot and to discriminate between the useful pennies and the useless halfpennies.

It was not nearly so clever as it looked.

In the beautiful Zoological Park in Edinburgh the Polar Bear was wont to sit on a rocky peninsula of a water-filled quarry. The visitors threw in buns, some of which floated on the surface.

But the playing period is much more; it is one of the few opportunities animals have of making experiments without too serious responsibilities.

Play is Nature's device for allowing elbow-room for new departures

(behaviour-variations) which may form part of the raw materials of progress. Play, we repeat, gives us a glimpse of the possibilities of the mammal mind.

"Watch a monkey and you cannot enumerate the things he does, cannot discover the stimuli to which he reacts, cannot conceive the raison d'etre of his pursuits.

Everything appeals to him. He likes to be active for the sake of activity.

"

but perhaps the most important advance of all was the means of comparing notes with neighbours, of corroborating individual experience by social intercourse. With words, also, it became easier to enregister outside himself the gains of the past.

It is not without significance that the Greek Logos, which may be translated "the word," may also be translated Mind.

When we take a survey of animal behaviour we see a long inclined plane. The outer world provokes simple creatures to answer back; simple creatures act experimentally on their surroundings.

(b) Some other thinkers have taught that the inner life of thought and feeling is only, as it were, an echo of the really important activity—that of the body and brain.

Ideas are just foam-bells on the hurrying streams and circling eddies of matter and energy that make up our physiological life.

To most of us this theory is impossible, because we are quite sure that ideas and feelings and purposes, which cannot be translated into matter and motion, are the clearest realities in our experience, and that they count for good and ill all through our …

… most of us this theory is impossible, because we are quite sure that ideas and feelings and purposes, which cannot be translated into matter and motion, are the clearest realities in our experience, and that they count for good and ill all through our life.

They are more than the tickings of the clock; they make the wheels go round.

(c) There are others who think that the most scientific position is simply to recognise both the bodily and the mental activities as equally important, and so closely interwoven that they cannot be separated.

In general, we may say, just two main processes—(1) testing all things, and (2) holding fast that which is good. New departures occur and these are tested for what they are worth. Idiosyncrasies crop up and they are sifted.

New cards come mysteriously from within into the creature's hand, and they are played—for better or for worse.

So by new variations and their sifting, by experimenting and enregistering the results, the mind has gradually evolved and will continue to evolve.

It is enough to say that some of them are so small that it would take 400,000,000 of them, in a line, to cover an inch of space; and that it takes at least a quintillion atoms of gold to weigh a single gramme.

Five million atoms of helium could be placed in a line across the diameter of a full stop.

An atom is the smallest particle of a chemical element. Two or more atoms come together to form a molecule: thus molecules form the mass of matter. A molecule of water is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen.

Innumerable methods have been tried, and the result is always the same.

A single grain of indigo, for instance, will colour a ton of water.

This obviously means that the grain contains billions of molecules which spread through the water. A grain of musk will scent a room—pour molecules into every part of it—for several years, yet not lose one-millionth of its mass in a year.

Molecules of hydrogen travel at four times that speed, or three times the speed with which a bullet leaves a rifle.

Each molecule of the air, which seems so still in the house on a summer's day, is really travelling faster than a rifle bullet does at the beginning of its journey.

It collides with another molecule every twenty-thousandth of an inch of its journey. It is turned from its course 5,000,000,000 times in every second by collisions.

In one of his interesting works Mr. Charles R. Gibson gives a photograph of two exactly equal pieces of paper in the opposite pans of a fine balance.

A single word has been written in pencil on one of these papers, and that little scraping of lead has been enough to bring down the scale!

The spectroscope will detect a quantity of matter four million times smaller even than this; and the electroscope is a million times still more sensitive than the spectroscope. We have a heat-measuring instrument, the bolometer, which makes the best thermometer seem Early Victorian.

The spectroscope will detect a quantity of matter four million times smaller even than this; and the electroscope is a million times still more sensitive than the spectroscope. We have a heat-measuring instrument, the bolometer, which makes the best thermometer seem Early Victorian.

It records the millionth of a degree of temperature.

It is such instruments, multiplied by the score, which enable us to do the fine work recorded in these pages.

They found a certain kind of pitchblende which was very active, and they analysed tons of it, concentrating always on the radiant element in it. After a time, as they successively worked out the non-radiant matter, the stuff began to glow.

In the end they extracted from eight tons of pitchblende about half a teaspoonful of something that was a million times more radiant than uranium. There was only one name for it—Radium.

That was the starting-point of the new development of physics and chemistry. From every laboratory in the world came a cry for radium salts (as pure radium was too precious), and hundreds of brilliant workers fastened on the new element.

It is believed that some day we shall be able to release, harness, and utilise atomic energy. "I am of opinion," says Sir William Bragg, "that atom energy will supply our future need.

A thousand years may pass before we can harness the atom, or to-morrow might see us with the reins in our hands.

That is the peculiarity of Physics—research and 'accidental' discovery go hand in hand." Half a brick contains as much energy as a small coal-field.

A thousand years may pass before we can harness the atom, or to-morrow might see us with the reins in our hands. That is the peculiarity of Physics—research and 'accidental' discovery go hand in hand."

Half a brick contains as much energy as a small coal-field.

The difficulties are tremendous, but, as Sir Oliver Lodge reminds us, there was just as much scepticism at one time about the utilisation of steam or electricity.

If we could produce light without heat our "gas bill" would shrink amazingly. So much energy is wasted in the production of heat-waves and ultra-violet waves which we do not want, that 90 per cent. or more of the power used in illumination is wasted.

Would that the glow-worm, or even the dead herring, would yield us its secret!

Phosphorus is the one thing we know as yet that suits the purpose, and—it smells! Indeed, our artificial light is not only extravagant in cost, but often poor in colour.

The tree struggles upward and spreads out its leaves fanwise to the blue sky to receive them.

In our coal-measures, the mighty dead forests of long ago, are vast stores of sunlight which we are prodigally using up.

The X-rays are the extreme end, the highest octave, of the series of waves. Their power of penetration implies that they are excessively minute, but even these have not held their secret from the modern physicist.

One of the most recent discoveries, made during a recent eclipse of the sun, is that light is subject to gravitation. A ray of light from a star is bent out of its straight path when it passes near the mass of the sun.

Professor Eddington tells us that we have as much right to speak of a pound of light as of a pound of sugar.

Professor Eddington even calculates that the earth receives 160 tons of light from the sun every year!

Shall we ever discover how we can replenish the dwindling resources of energy, or find out how we can call into being the at present unavailable energy which is stored up in uniform temperature?

It looks as if our successors would witness an interesting race, between the progress of science on the one hand and the depletion of natural resources upon the other.

The natural rate of flow of energy from its primary atomic reservoirs to the sea of waste heat energy of uniform temperature, allows life to proceed at a complete pace sternly regulated by the inexorable laws of supply and demand, which the biologists have recognised …