TheBeginningOfTheEarth.docVIP

The Beginning Of The Earth WONDERFUL are the changes brought about by the many motions of the flying earth ! How complex they are ! Our planet rotates on its axis, which causes day and night. It revolves in its orbit, in a leaning position, which produces the seasons. The pull of the moon and sun on the leaning top causes the axis to rotate conically, and this motion it completes in about 26,000 years, the motion being styled the precession of the equinoxes. The pull of the moon makes it sway back-ward and forward in its orbit; and this pull has to do with the tides. The pull of the other planets alters the eccentricity of its revolution, so that the sun is sometimes much farther from the centre of its orbit than at present; and this variability, combined with the conical motion, causes rhythms of arctic and tropical climate, called glacial periods, which have produced extraordinary changes in the history of living creatures upon the earth. Turning from these great changes to contemplate the earths surface, we see a tumult of life, of struggle and conquest, of birth, maturity, and death, of organisms and their parasites, and the parasites of parasites. The microscope shows the seemingly inert soil of the field to be teeming and seething with the most varied life; it exhibits a drop of stagnant water as a world of wonders. The profusion of variety and the complexity of detail seem at first to have no limit. Among insects alone the different kinds or species are numbered by hundreds of thousands. Nor is there only variety due to place, but also variety due to time. Go back a tick of eternitys pendulum, and the life clothing the earth is altogether unlike its present vesture. There are no marks of mans hand upon the earth, for man does not exist. Another tick the flowering-plants and the mammals are not on the scene; huge reptiles swarm amid the forests of clubmosses, ferns, and horsetails. Still another tick the sunlight has not begun to use the green coloring ma