Read Ebook: The Romance of Golden Star ... by Griffith George Chetwynd Pearse Alfred Illustrator

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In furtherance of the idea referred to in the preface, that a far more effective use may be made of pictures in teaching than is usual, a very extended use has been made of them in "The Strange Adventures of a Pebble," and, moreover, these pictures have been made to talk, as it were, by means of extended analysis and comment upon their significant features; this for the double purpose of teaching important facts, as only pictures can teach, and of stimulating the invaluable habit of observation and of logical reasoning about things observed.

One of the main purposes of the book, as stated in the preface, is to stimulate interest in further reading and study on the many subjects to which it relates.

THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A PEBBLE

In the beginning the earth was without form and void.

IN THE BEGINNING

HOW MR. APOLLO TURNED ON THE LIGHT

The first scenes of all in my strange, eventful history remind me of the old Greek story about Apollo and that boy of his--Phaeton. Apollo's business, you remember, was to take the sun through the skies every day in his golden chariot, so that people could see to get about. It was a ticklish job, as the horses were fiery. As a rule, however, things went fairly well. To be sure, there were overdone days occasionally, just as there are now. Then the crops would wither and the birds and brooks stop singing. This, as the little Greek boys and girls believed, was because Apollo's horses ran too near the earth.

But nothing serious happened until one time Phaeton persuaded father to let him drive the sun chariot for a day. The horses, feeling at once a new and weak hand on the reins, tore out of the regular road and went dashing right and left. They even got so near the North Pole that the ice began to melt. They fairly flew down toward the earth, set the mountains smoking, and dried up all the springs and most of the rivers.

THEN THINGS BEGAN TO HAPPEN

They dried up a certain great lake, so that there is to this day the Libyan Desert in Africa, where this lake used to be. They made the very sea shrink so that there were "wide naked plains where once its billows rose."

Finally Mother Earth called on Jupiter Pluvius, as god of thunder, rain, and storms, to stop Phaeton and the runaways and put out the fire.

Struck by a bolt of lightning poor Phaeton fell headlong from the skies, and a world-wide rain put out the world-wide fire.

But the earth really has been on fire in a sense; that is, has melted from the heat. And in parts where you would least suspect--the rocks. There's where I got into it. And some of these rocks, not more than ten miles from where you live, are either still molten, or continue to melt from time to time; as you can see when lava comes pouring from volcanoes, such as those of Hawaii.

In the days of the Apollo story most men still thought the earth was the centre of the universe; that the sun, moon, and stars moved around it. But Pythagoras, one of the Greek philosophers, had formed a general notion of the truth that the earth is only one planet in a great system. Then, along in the Sixteenth Century, came Copernicus, and by mathematical calculation--he was a fine hand at figures--began to find out things that showed the wise old Greek had made a happy guess. Then Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and others, each working on different parts of the problem, finally settled the question. They found that there are just worlds of worlds, and that ours is only one of them.

About the time of the American Revolution a great French mathematician, Laplace, worked out a story of the origin of the earth which is, briefly, this:

What we know now as the solar system--the sun with its attendant worlds--was once a single big ball of fiery gas, a nebula. As this nebula cooled it shrank, and as it shrank it whirled faster because it had a smaller track in which to turn, and with an equal amount of force would, of course, get around oftener. The faster it whirled the more the outside of it tended to fly off, as water flies off a whirling grindstone or as a stone flies from a sling. This centrifugal or "fly-away" force was greatest at the sun's equator, and it threw off big rings. Afterward, around some centre of greater density in these rings, the gaseous particles in the rest of the ring gathered, so forming spheres. Then some of the spheres themselves threw off rings in the same way which became what are called satellites. The moon, which is our satellite, Laplace supposed to have originated in this way. The ring which Saturn still wears he thought would some day become a satellite.

This theory of Laplace was long accepted as the true one. Indeed, it was only yesterday, comparatively, that other explanations were offered as to how we came to have a world to stand on. The broadest of these new theories--the one that undertakes to explain the most--is that of Professor Chamberlin, of the University of Chicago.

YOU CAN SEE THESE WORLDS IN THE MAKING

Owing to the more powerful telescopes of to-day, and the amount of exploring among the worlds that has been going on since the time of Laplace, several things have been discovered that have brought his theory into question. For one thing, many more nebulae have been found in space than were known when Laplace worked out his great conception, and among them all not one has been found with a central mass surrounded by a ring. Moreover, our sharp-eyed telescopes show that Saturn's ring, which Laplace thought was a solid mass, is really made up of a great number of small satellites: baby worlds. The greater number of these nebulae are like the ones you see in the illustration on page 5. They consist of very bright centres with spirals streaming out from opposite sides. Just take a look at the picture. Doesn't the shape of those spirals suggest that the central mass is whirling? And notice the little white lumps here and there. The thinner, veil-like portions of the mass, as well as the "lumps," are supposed to be made of particles of matter, but the lumps to be more condensed. All the particles, big and little, are known to be revolving about the central mass, much as the earth revolves about the sun. The little white lumps, or knots, in the filmy skein are supposed to be worlds in the making. Being larger than the other particles, they draw the smaller to them, according to the same law of gravitation which makes every unsupported thing on earth fall to the ground, because the earth is so much bigger than anything there is on it. Since these bright little lumps behave so much like the worlds we know as planets, and yet are relatively so small, they are called planetessimals, or "little planets." So Professor Chamberlin's idea of the origin of worlds is known as the "planetessimal theory."

According to this theory the earth was once a mere baby world like those white lumps, and grew by gathering in its smaller neighbors from time to time by the power of gravitation. The larger it grew the more particles of solid matter it could draw to itself. Then it drew larger masses, for with increased mass came an increased pull of gravity. In the same way the earth is still growing, for it is thought that the shooting stars or meteors we see at night are little planets being gathered in.

And before I got to be myself at all, while I was still only a part of the big pebble called the Earth, your geography and I lay at the bottom of the sea.

For ages and ages!

This is one of the stories you will find in the literature of science, of how, along with North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia--have I left out any?--I came to land and brought your geography with me.

I remember hearing a pretty young lady say, once upon a time:

"There," said she, "I'm through with geography forever!"

You see, although she had passed with marks around 90, she still had the idea that geography is a book. You and I know, of course, that the real geography isn't a book at all. It's the world itself.

PUTTING THE CONTINENTS ON THE GLOBE

But there was a time when there was no land. It was all water, and the continents were lifted into their places, much as you model a continent in making a relief map; they were sketched out and then filled in. North America, for example. First of all up came that mass in the northeast in what is now Canada; the Laurentian Highlands, as they are called in your geography. They rose very, very slowly, you understand, only a few feet in a thousand years; for Nature has all the time there is and never hurries. These highlands , along with the other rock formations of our continent, are supposed to be the oldest land on the earth. The continents of Europe and the rest were born later. So you see Columbus didn't discover the New World at all; he really came from the New World and discovered the Old!

Next after the highlands north of the St. Lawrence up came the tops of the mountains you see running along the eastern coast, what we now call the Appalachians. Then the Rocky Mountains began to raise their heads and looked eastward toward their brother mountains across a great mediterranean sea, the bottom of which is now the Mississippi Valley. Mediterranean means "middle of the land."

ADMITTING NEW STATES TO THE MAP

Wisconsin, into which I moved from the Laurentian Highlands in later years, was on the lower end of a long, thin tongue of rock reaching out from these highlands to the southwest. While Wisconsin went on growing, the Alleghanies came up and brought some Middle Atlantic geography with them. Up with all these early settler mountains came, in the course of time, the beginnings of neighbor States. All these big, barren rocks , rising and ever rising, age after age, spread more surface to the sun. And the sun, and the wind, and the frost, followed by the lowest forms of plant life--the Adams of the vegetable world--gradually worked the surface of the rock into soil; and so, as we may say, got ready for the spring plowing.

It's a wonderful old story, isn't it? But more wonderful still, it always seemed to me, is the story of how they found all this out.

Who do you suppose first told about it? The last people you would ever think of, I'm sure--the oysters!

WHAT THE OYSTERS TOLD XENOPHANES

It sounds like a passage from "Alice in Wonderland," or "Through the Looking-Glass," doesn't it? But it's a fact. Away back, more than 2,000 years ago, a wise Greek called Xenophanes, who lived in a place called Colophon, and so was called Xenophanes of Colophon, said that he thought the rocks of the mountain sides must once have been under the sea because of the oyster shells that were found embedded in many of them.

"For," said Xenophanes of Colophon, "how else could the oyster shells have got there? Who ever heard of oysters climbing a mountain?"

Another evidence that lands come up out of the sea is this: Even before the days of Scott and Maryatt and Fenimore Cooper, men--and, of course, boys--were interested in caves that face upon the sea. They are such jolly places for pirates, and for boys playing pirate, and for mermaids drying their hair. It was plain that down where the waves in storms could reach them the sea itself bored out these caves. But how about those caves in the cliffs high above the waves? The sea must have made them, too, once upon a time when the land was lower in the water. Then the land was raised.

Still more striking was the fact that not only caves but old sea beaches were found on hill and mountain slopes far from the sea, sometimes hundreds of miles inland. You can tell the old beaches by their shape and the way in which the pebbles are sorted by size, just as you find them on beaches to-day.

THE BAKED APPLE AND THE BULGING WORLD

"And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so."

According to the planetessimal theory the way in which the seas were made was this:

Owing to the collision--the "bang"--of the planetessimals against the earth, and against each other as they met at the "terminal station," heat was generated. The compression, the squeezing together, of the earth from its own weight--the gravity pull of the whole mass toward the centre--generated still more heat, and the heat and pressure drove the gases out of the rock. These gases included hydrogen and oxygen. These two gases cooling and combining themselves, in a way they have, became water, and there were other gases, such as nitrogen and carbon gas, that helped to make the air.

WHEN THE SEAS WERE ALL IN THE SKY

At first the water was in the form of dense clouds of overhanging vapor which, growing bigger and bigger, finally fell in rain. The heat, made by the pressure of the outside of the earth toward the centre as the earth kept growing, caused volcanic explosions. But there were far more volcanoes in those early days when the earth was settling down, and being "settled up," as it were, by these energetic pioneers in the fields of space--the planetessimals--and the surface became pitted with craters. In these great catch basins the rain was stored, and, as for ages the rain kept falling faster than the vapor rose from the earth, many of these bodies of water united, and so formed the lakes, the river systems, the oceans, and the seas.

THE FOUR GREAT FEATURES OF THE BIBLE STORY

All of which, while it differs so much from the theory of Laplace, does not affect the Bible outline of the origin of the earth. For these four great things must still have been: an earth without form, and void; a great deep; upon its face darkness from the continuing masses of black rain-laden clouds which overhung it and shut out the sun; the final dividing up of supply between the vapor of the clouds and "the waters upon the earth," so that at last the dark cloud curtain disappeared, and the sun began to rule the day. "Let there be light."

But good-by to Phaeton and the story of an original glowing ball which cooled off on the outside. If the earth grew bit by bit instead of being whirled off in one fiery mass by the sun it was never any hotter than it is now, if as hot. It grew hot by being pressed together by its own weight, and by the blows of additional little worlds as they fell upon it.

But on one thing everybody agrees, that the rocks, as you go toward the earth's centre, have been and still are in a molten state; that this rock, when it cools, becomes granite, all full of little crystals like a lump of sugar, and that the Granites are one of the F. F. E.'s.

I, as you see, am a Granite. So, besides going through fire and water--yes, and ice, as you will learn--and having many strange and wearing adventures both by land and sea--I'm "awfully" old. Older than you think. I looked it up in the family record called the "Geological Column"--just the other day. That column gives my age as "80+." This means I'm 80,000,000 years old, going on 81!

HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY

In the Greek myth stories what else was Mr. Apollo supposed to do for the world and its people besides turning on the light?

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