The Story of Evolution Part 1

The Story of Evolution.

by Joseph McCabe.

PREFACE

An ingenious student of science once entertained his generation with a theory of how one might behold again all the stirring chapters that make up the story of the earth. The living scene of our time is lit by the light of the sun, and for every few rays that enter the human eye, and convey the image of it to the human mind, great floods of the reflected light pour out, swiftly and indefinitely, into s.p.a.ce. Imagine, then, a man moving out into s.p.a.ce more rapidly than light, his face turned toward the earth. Flashing through the void at, let us say, a million miles a second, he would (if we can overlook the dispersion of the rays of light) overtake in succession the light that fell on the French Revolution, the Reformation, the Norman Conquest, and the faces of the ancient empires. He would read, in reverse order, the living history of man and whatever lay before the coming of man.

Few thought, as they smiled over this fairy tale of science, that some such panoramic survey of the story of the earth, and even of the heavens, might one day be made in a leisure hour by ordinary mortals; that in the soil on which they trod were surer records of the past than in its doubtful literary remains, and in the deeper rocks were records that dimly lit a vast abyss of time of which they never dreamed. It is the supreme achievement of modern science to have discovered and deciphered these records. The picture of the past which they afford is, on the whole, an outline sketch. Here and there the details, the colour, the light and shade, may be added; but the greater part of the canvas is left to the more skilful hand of a future generation, and even the broad lines are at times uncertain. Yet each age would know how far its scientific men have advanced in constructing that picture of the growth of the heavens and the earth, and the aim of the present volume is to give, in clear and plain language, as full an account of the story as the present condition of our knowledge and the limits of the volume will allow. The author has been for many years interested in the evolution of things, or the way in which suns and atoms, fishes and flowers, hills and elephants, even man and his inst.i.tutions, came to be what they are. Lecturing and writing on one or other phase of the subject have, moreover, taught him a language which the inexpert seem to understand, although he is not content merely to give a superficial description of the past inhabitants of the earth.

The particular features which, it is hoped, may give the book a distinctive place in the large literature of evolution are, first, that it includes the many evolutionary discoveries of the last few years, gathers its material from the score of sciences which confine themselves to separate aspects of the universe, and blends all these facts and discoveries in a more or less continuous chronicle of the life of the heavens and the earth. Then the author has endeavoured to show, not merely how, but why, scene succeeds scene in the chronicle of the earth, and life slowly climbs from level to level. He has taken nature in the past as we find it to-day: an interconnected whole, in which the changes of land and sea, of heat and cold, of swamp and hill, are faithfully reflected in the forms of its living population. And, finally, he has written for those who are not students of science, or whose knowledge may be confined to one branch of science, and used a plain speech which a.s.sumes no previous knowledge on the reader's part.

For the rest, it will be found that no strained effort is made to trace pedigrees of animals and plants when the material is scanty; that, if on account of some especial interest disputable or conjectural speculations are admitted, they are frankly described as such; and that the more important differences of opinion which actually divide astronomers, geologists, biologists, and anthropologists are carefully taken into account and briefly explained. A few English and American works are recommended for the convenience of those who would study particular chapters more closely, but it has seemed useless, in such a work, to give a bibliography of the hundreds of English, American, French, German, and Italian works which have been consulted.

THE STORY OF EVOLUTION

CHAPTER I. THE DISCOVERY OF THE UNIVERSE

The beginning of the victorious career of modern science was very largely due to the making of two stimulating discoveries at the close of the Middle Ages. One was the discovery of the earth: the other the discovery of the universe. Men were confined, like molluscs in their sh.e.l.ls, by a belief that they occupied the centre of a comparatively small disk--some ventured to say a globe--which was poised in a mysterious way in the middle of a small system of heavenly bodies. The general feeling was that these heavenly bodies were lamps hung on a not too remote ceiling for the purpose of lighting their ways. Then certain enterprising sailors--Vasco da Gama, Maghalaes, Columbus--brought home the news that the known world was only one side of an enormous globe, and that there were vast lands and great peoples thousands of miles across the ocean. The minds of men in Europe had hardly strained their sh.e.l.ls sufficiently to embrace this larger earth when the second discovery was reported. The roof of the world, with its useful little system of heavenly bodies, began to crack and disclose a profound and mysterious universe surrounding them on every side. One cannot understand the solidity of the modern doctrine of the formation of the heavens and the earth until one appreciates this revolution.

Before the law of gravitation had been discovered it was almost impossible to regard the universe as other than a small and compact system. We shall see that a few daring minds pierced the veil, and peered out wonderingly into the real universe beyond, but for the great ma.s.s of men it was quite impossible. To them the modern idea of a universe consisting of hundreds of millions of bodies, each weighing billions of tons, strewn over billions of miles of s.p.a.ce, would have seemed the dream of a child or a savage. Material bodies were "heavy,"

and would "fall down" if they were not supported. The universe, they said, was a sensible scientific structure; things were supported in their respective places. A great dome, of some unknown but compact material, spanned the earth, and sustained the heavenly bodies. It might rest on the distant mountains, or be borne on the shoulders of an Atlas; or the whole cosmic scheme might be laid on the back of a gigantic elephant, and--if you pressed--the elephant might stand on the hard sh.e.l.l of a tortoise. But you were not encouraged to press.

The idea of the vault had come from Babylon, the first home of science.

No furnaces thickened that clear atmosphere, and the heavy-robed priests at the summit of each of the seven-staged temples were astronomers.

Night by night for thousands of years they watched the stars and planets tracing their undeviating paths across the sky. To explain their movements the priest-astronomers invented the solid firmament. Beyond the known land, encircling it, was the sea, and beyond the sea was a range of high mountains, forming another girdle round the earth. On these mountains the dome of the heavens rested, much as the dome of St. Paul's rests on its lofty masonry. The sun travelled across its under-surface by day, and went back to the east during the night through a tunnel in the lower portion of the vault. To the common folk the priests explained that this framework of the world was the body of an ancient and disreputable G.o.ddess. The G.o.d of light had slit her in two, "as you do a dried fish," they said, and made the plain of the earth with one half and the blue arch of the heavens with the other.

So Chaldaea lived out its 5000 years without discovering the universe.

Egypt adopted the idea from more scientific Babylon. Amongst the fragments of its civilisation we find representations of the firmament as a G.o.ddess, arching over the earth on her hands and feet, condemned to that eternal posture by some victorious G.o.d. The idea spread amongst the smaller nations which were lit by the civilisation of Babylon and Egypt.

Some blended it with coa.r.s.e old legends; some, like the Persians and Hebrews, refined it. The Persians made fire a purer and lighter spirit, so that the stars would need no support. But everywhere the blue vault hemmed in the world and the ideas of men. It was so close, some said, that the birds could reach it. At last the genius of Greece brooded over the whole chaos of cosmical speculations.

The native tradition of Greece was a little more helpful than the Babylonian teaching. First was chaos; then the heavier matter sank to the bottom, forming the disk of the earth, with the ocean poured round it, and the less coa.r.s.e matter floated as an atmosphere above it, and the still finer matter formed an "aether" above the atmosphere.

A remarkably good guess, in its very broad outline; but the solid firmament still arched the earth, and the stars were little undying fires in the vault. The earth itself was small and flat. It stretched (on the modern map) from about Gibraltar to the Caspian, and from Central Germany--where the entrance to the lower world was located--to the Atlas mountains. But all the varied and conflicting culture of the older empires was now pa.s.sing into Greece, lighting up in succession the civilisations of Asia Minor, the Greek islands, and then Athens and its sister states. Men began to think.

The first genius to have a glimpse of the truth seems to have been the grave and mystical Pythagorus (born about 582 B.C.). He taught his little school that the earth was a globe, not a disk, and that it turned on its axis in twenty-four hours. The earth and the other planets were revolving round the central fire of the system; but the sun was a reflection of this central fire, not the fire itself. Even Pythagoras, moreover, made the heavens a solid sphere revolving, with its stars, round the central fire; and the truth he discovered was mingled with so much mysticism, and confined to so small and retired a school, that it was quickly lost again. In the next generation Anaxagoras taught that the sun was a vast globe of white-hot iron, and that the stars were material bodies made white-hot by friction with the ether. A generation later the famous Democritus came nearer than any to the truth. The universe was composed of an infinite number of indestructible particles, called "atoms," which had gradually settled from a state of chaotic confusion to their present orderly arrangement in large ma.s.ses. The sun was a body of enormous size, and the points of light in the Milky Way were similar suns at a tremendous distance from the earth. Our universe, moreover, was only one of an infinite number of universes, and an eternal cycle of destruction and re-formation was running through these myriads of worlds.

By sheer speculation Greece was well on the way of discovery. Then the mists of philosophy fell between the mind of Greece and nature, and the notions of Democritus were rejected with disdain; and then, very speedily, the decay of the brilliant nation put an end to its feverish search for truth. Greek culture pa.s.sed to Alexandria, where it met the remains of the culture of Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia, and one more remarkable effort was made to penetrate the outlying universe before the night of the Middle Ages fell on the old world.

Astronomy was ardently studied at Alexandria, and was fortunately combined with an a.s.siduous study of mathematics. Aristarchus (about 320-250 B.C.) calculated that the sun was 84,000,000 miles away; a vast expansion of the solar system and, for the time, a remarkable approach to the real figure (92,000,000) Eratosthenes (276-196 B.C.) made an extremely good calculation of the size of the earth, though he held it to be the centre of a small universe. He concluded that it was a globe measuring 27,000 (instead of 23,700) miles in circ.u.mference. Posidonius (135-51 B.C.) came even nearer with a calculation that the circ.u.mference was between 25,000 and 19,000 miles; and he made a fairly correct estimate of the diameter, and therefore distance, of the sun. Hipparchus (190-120 B.C.) made an extremely good calculation of the distance of the moon.

By the brilliant work of the Alexandrian astronomers the old world seemed to be approaching the discovery of the universe. Men were beginning to think in millions, to gaze boldly into deep abysses of s.p.a.ce, to talk of vast fiery globes that made the earth insignificant But the splendid energy gradually failed, and the long line was closed by Ptolemaeus, who once more put the earth in the centre of the system, and so imposed what is called the Ptolemaic system on Europe. The keen school-life of Alexandria still ran on, and there might have been a return to the saner early doctrines, but at last Alexandrian culture was extinguished in the blood of the aged Hypatia, and the night fell.

Rome had had no genius for science; though Lucretius gave an immortal expression to the views of Democritus and Epicurus, and such writers as Cicero and Pliny did great service to a later age in preserving fragments of the older discoveries. The curtains were once more drawn about the earth. The glimpses which adventurous Greeks had obtained of the great outlying universe were forgotten for a thousand years. The earth became again the little platform in the centre of a little world, on which men and women played their little parts, preening themselves on their superiority to their pagan ancestors.

I do not propose to tell the familiar story of the revival at any length. As far as the present subject is concerned, it was literally a Renascence, or re-birth, of Greek ideas. Constantinople having been taken by the Turks (1453), hundreds of Greek scholars, with their old literature, sought refuge in Europe, and the vigorous brain of the young nations brooded over the ancient speculations, just as the vigorous young brain of Greece had done two thousand years before. Copernicus (1473-1543) acknowledges that he found the secret of the movements of the heavenly bodies in the speculations of the old Greek thinkers.

Galilei (1564-1642) enlarged the Copernican system with the aid of the telescope; and the telescope was an outcome of the new study of optics which had been inspired in Roger Bacon and other medieval scholars by the optical works, directly founded on the Greek, of the Spanish Moors.

Giordano Bruno still further enlarged the system; he pictured the universe boldly as an infinite ocean of liquid ether, in which the stars, with retinues of inhabited planets, floated majestically. Bruno was burned at the stake (1600); but the curtains that had so long been drawn about the earth were now torn aside for ever, and men looked inquiringly into the unfathomable depths beyond. Descartes (1596-1650) revived the old Greek idea of a gradual evolution of the heavens and the earth from a primitive chaos of particles, taught that the stars stood out at unimaginable distances in the ocean of ether, and imagined the ether as stirring in gigantic whirlpools, which bore cosmic bodies in their orbits as the eddy in the river causes the cork to revolve.

These stimulating conjectures made a deep impression on the new age.

A series of great astronomers had meantime been patiently and scientifically laying the foundations of our knowledge. Kepler (1571-1630) formulated the laws of the movement of the planets; Newton (1642-1727) crowned the earlier work with his discovery of the real agency that sustains cosmic bodies in their relative positions. The primitive notion of a material frame and the confining dome of the ancients were abandoned. We know now that a framework of the most ma.s.sive steel would be too frail to hold together even the moon and the earth. It would be rent by the strain. The action of gravitation is the all-sustaining power. Once introduce that idea, and the great ocean of ether might stretch illimitably on every side, and the vastest bodies might be scattered over it and traverse it in stupendous paths. Thus it came about that, as the little optic tube of Galilei slowly developed into the giant telescope of Herschel, and then into the powerful refracting telescopes of the United States of our time; as the new science of photography provided observers with a new eye--a sensitive plate that will register messages, which the human eye cannot detect, from far-off regions; and as a new instrument, the spectroscope, endowed astronomers with a power of perceiving fresh aspects of the inhabitants of s.p.a.ce, the horizon rolled backward, and the mind contemplated a universe of colossal extent and power.

Let us try to conceive this universe before we study its evolution. I do not adopt any of the numerous devices that have been invented for the purpose of impressing on the imagination the large figures we must use. One may doubt if any of them are effective, and they are at least familiar. Our solar system--the family of sun and planets which had been sheltered under a mighty dome resting on the hill-tops--has turned out to occupy a span of s.p.a.ce some 16,000,000,000 miles in diameter. That is a very small area in the new universe. Draw a circle, 100 billion miles in diameter, round the sun, and you will find that it contains only three stars besides the sun. In other words, a sphere of s.p.a.ce measuring 300 billion miles in circ.u.mference--we will not venture upon the number of cubic miles--contains only four stars (the sun, alpha Centauri, 21,185 Lalande, and 61 Cygni). However, this part of s.p.a.ce seems to be below the average in point of population, and we must adopt a different way of estimating the magnitude of the universe from the number of its stellar citizens.

Beyond the vast sphere of comparatively empty s.p.a.ce immediately surrounding our sun lies the stellar universe into which our great telescopes are steadily penetrating. Recent astronomers give various calculations, ranging from 200,000,000 to 2,000,000,000, of the number of stars that have yet come within our faintest knowledge. Let us accept the modest provisional estimate of 500,000,000. Now, if we had reason to think that these stars were of much the same size and brilliance as our sun, we should be able roughly to calculate their distance from their faintness. We cannot do this, as they differ considerably in size and intrinsic brilliance. Sirius is more than twice the size of our sun and gives out twenty times as much light. Canopus emits 20,000 times as much light as the sun, but we cannot say, in this case, how much larger it is than the sun. Arcturus, however, belongs to the same cla.s.s of stars as our sun, and astronomers conclude that it must be thousands of times larger than the sun. A few stars are known to be smaller than the sun.

Some are, intrinsically, far more brilliant; some far less brilliant.

Another method has been adopted, though this also must be regarded with great reserve. The distance of the nearer stars can be positively measured, and this has been done in a large number of cases. The proportion of such cases to the whole is still very small, but, as far as the results go, we find that stars of the first magnitude are, on the average, nearly 200 billion miles away; stars of the second magnitude nearly 300 billion; and stars of the third magnitude 450 billion. If this fifty per cent increase of distance for each lower magnitude of stars were certain and constant, the stars of the eighth magnitude would be 3000 billion miles away, and stars of the sixteenth magnitude would be 100,000 billion miles away; and there are still two fainter cla.s.ses of stars which are registered on long-exposure photographs. The mere vastness of these figures is immaterial to the astronomer, but he warns us that the method is uncertain. We may be content to conclude that the starry universe over which our great telescopes keep watch stretches for thousands, and probably tens of thousands, of billions of miles. There are myriads of stars so remote that, though each is a vast incandescent globe at a temperature of many thousand degrees, and though their light is concentrated on the mirrors or in the lenses of our largest telescopes and directed upon the photographic plate at the rate of more than 800 billion waves a second, they take several hours to register the faintest point of light on the plate.

When we reflect that the universe has grown with the growth of our telescopes and the application of photography we wonder whether we may as yet see only a fraction of the real universe, as small in comparison with the whole as the Babylonian system was in comparison with ours. We must be content to wonder. Some affirm that the universe is infinite; others that it is limited. We have no firm ground in science for either a.s.sertion. Those who claim that the system is limited point out that, as the stars decrease in brightness, they increase so enormously in number that the greater faintness is more than compensated, and therefore, if there were an infinite series of magnitudes, the midnight sky would be a blaze of light. But this theoretical reasoning does not allow for dense regions of s.p.a.ce that may obstruct the light, or vast regions of vacancy between vast systems of stars. Even apart from the evidence that dark nebulae or other special light-absorbing regions do exist, the question is under discussion in science at the present moment whether light is not absorbed in the pa.s.sage through ordinary s.p.a.ce. There is reason to think that it is. Let us leave precarious speculations about finiteness and infinity to philosophers, and take the universe as we know it.

Picture, then, on the more moderate estimate, these 500,000,000 suns scattered over tens of thousands of billions of miles. Whether they form one stupendous system, and what its structure may be, is too obscure a subject to be discussed here. Imagine yourself standing at a point from which you can survey the whole system and see into the depths and details of it. At one point is a single star (like our sun), billions of miles from its nearest neighbour, wearing out its solitary life in a portentous discharge of energy. Commonly the stars are in pairs, turning round a common centre in periods that may occupy hundreds of days or hundreds of years. Here and there they are gathered into cl.u.s.ters, sometimes to the number of thousands in a cl.u.s.ter, travelling together over the desert of s.p.a.ce, or trailing in lines like luminous caravans.

All are rushing headlong at inconceivable speeds. Few are known to be so sluggish as to run, like our sun, at only 8000 miles an hour. One of the "fixed" stars of the ancients, the mighty Arcturus, darts along at a rate of more than 250 miles a second. As they rush, their surfaces glowing at a temperature anywhere between 1000 and 20,000 degrees C., they shake the environing s.p.a.ce with electric waves from every tiny particle of their body at a rate of from 400 billion to 800 billion waves a second. And somewhere round the fringe of one of the smaller suns there is a little globe, more than a million times smaller than the solitary star it attends, lost in the blaze of its light, on which human beings find a home during a short and late chapter of its history.

Look at it again from another aspect. Every colour of the rainbow is found in the stars. Emerald, azure, ruby, gold, lilac, topaz, fawn--they shine with wonderful and mysterious beauty. But, whether these more delicate shades be really in the stars or no, three colours are certainly found in them. The stars sink from bluish white to yellow, and on to deep red. The immortal fires of the Greeks are dying. Piercing the depths with a dull red glow, here and there, are the dying suns; and if you look closely you will see, flitting like ghosts across the light of their luminous neighbours, the gaunt frames of dead worlds. Here and there are vast stretches of loose cosmic dust that seems to be gathering into embryonic stars; here and there are stars in infancy or in strenuous youth. You detect all the chief phases of the making of a world in the forms and fires of these colossal aggregations of matter.

Like the chance crowd on which you may look down in the square of a great city, they range from the infant to the worn and sinking aged.

There is this difference, however, that the embryos of worlds sprawl, gigantic and luminous, across the expanse; that the dark and mighty bodies of the dead rush, like the rest, at twenty or fifty miles a second; and that at intervals some appalling blaze, that dims even the fearful furnaces of the living, seems to announce the resurrection of the dead. And there is this further difference, that, strewn about the intermediate s.p.a.ce between the gigantic spheres, is a ma.s.s of cosmic dust--minute grains, or large blocks, or shoals consisting of myriads of pieces, or immeasurable clouds of fine gas--that seems to be the rubbish left over after the making of worlds, or the material gathering for the making of other worlds.

This is the universe that the nineteenth century discovered and the twentieth century is interpreting. Before we come to tell the fortunes of our little earth we have to see how matter is gathered into these stupendous globes of fire, how they come sometimes to have smaller bodies circling round them on which living things may appear, how they supply the heat and light and electricity that the living things need, and how the story of life on a planet is but a fragment of a larger story. We have to study the birth and death of worlds, perhaps the most impressive of all the studies that modern science offers us. Indeed, if we would read the whole story of evolution, there is an earlier chapter even than this; the latest chapter to be opened by science, the first to be read. We have to ask where the matter, which we are going to gather into worlds, itself came from; to understand more clearly what is the relation to it of the forces or energies--gravitation, electricity, etc.--with which we glibly mould it into worlds, or fashion it into living things; and, above all, to find out its relation to this mysterious ocean of ether in which it is found.

Less than half a century ago the making of worlds was, in popular expositions of science, a comparatively easy business. Take an indefinite number of atoms of various gases and metals, scatter them in a fine cloud over some thousands of millions of miles of s.p.a.ce, let gravitation slowly compress the cloud into a globe, its temperature rising through the compression, let it throw off a ring of matter, which in turn gravitation will compress into a globe, and you have your earth circulating round the sun. It is not quite so simple; in any case, serious men of science wanted to know how these convenient and a.s.sorted atoms happened to be there at all, and what was the real meaning of this equally convenient gravitation. There was a greater truth than he knew in the saying of an early physicist, that the atom had the look of a "manufactured article." It was increasingly felt, as the nineteenth century wore on, that the atoms had themselves been evolved out of some simpler material, and that ether might turn out to be the primordial chaos. There were even those who felt that ether would prove to be the one source of all matter and energy. And just before the century closed a light began to shine in those deeper abysses of the submaterial world, and the foundations of the universe began to appear.

CHAPTER II. THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE UNIVERSE

To the mind of the vast majority of earlier observers the phrase "foundations of the universe" would have suggested something enormously ma.s.sive and solid. From what we have already seen we are prepared, on the contrary, to pa.s.s from the inconceivably large to the inconceivably small. Our sun is, as far as our present knowledge goes, one of modest dimensions. Arcturus and Canopus must be thousands of times larger than it. Yet our sun is 320,000 times heavier than the earth, and the earth weighs some 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons. But it is only in resolving these stupendous ma.s.ses into their tiniest elements that we can reach the ultimate realities, or foundations, of the whole.

Modern science rediscovered the atoms of Democritus, a.n.a.lysed the universe into innumerable swarms of these tiny particles, and then showed how the infinite variety of things could be built up by their combinations. For this it was necessary to suppose that the atoms were not all alike, but belonged to a large number of different cla.s.ses. From twenty-six letters of the alphabet we could make millions of different words. From forty or fifty different "elements" the chemist could construct the most varied objects in nature, from the frame of a man to a landscape. But improved methods of research led to the discovery of new elements, and at last the chemist found that he had seventy or eighty of these "ultimate realities," each having its own very definite and very different characters. As it is the experience of science to find unity underlying variety, this was profoundly unsatisfactory, and the search began for the great unity which underlay the atoms of matter.

The difficulty of the search may be ill.u.s.trated by a few figures. Very delicate methods were invented for calculating the size of the atoms.

Laymen are apt to smile--it is a very foolish smile--at these figures, but it is enough to say that the independent and even more delicate methods suggested by recent progress in physics have quite confirmed them.

Take a cubic millimetre of hydrogen. As a millimetre is less than 1/25th of an inch, the reader must imagine a tiny bubble of gas that would fit comfortably inside the letter "o" as it is printed here. The various refined methods of the modern physicist show that there are 40,000 billion molecules (each consisting of two atoms of the gas) in this tiny bubble. It is a little universe, repeating on an infinitesimal scale the numbers and energies of the stellar universe. These molecules are not packed together, moreover, but are separated from each other by s.p.a.ces which are enormous in proportion to the size of the atoms. Through these empty s.p.a.ces the atoms dash at an average speed of more than a thousand miles an hour, each pa.s.sing something like 6,000,000,000 of its neighbours in the course of every second. Yet this particle of gas is a thinly populated world in comparison with a particle of metal. Take a cubic centimetre of copper. In that very small square of solid matter (each side of the cube measuring a little more than a third of an inch) there are about a quadrillion atoms. It is these minute and elusive particles that modern physics sets out to master.

At first it was noticed that the atom of hydrogen was the smallest or lightest of all, and the other atoms seemed to be multiples of it.

A Russian chemist, Mendeleeff, drew up a table of the elements in ill.u.s.tration of this, grouping them in families, which seemed to point to hydrogen as the common parent, or ultimate const.i.tuent, of each. When newly discovered elements fell fairly into place in this scheme the idea was somewhat confidently advanced that the evolution of the elements was discovered. Thus an atom of carbon seemed to be a group of 12 atoms of hydrogen, an atom of oxygen 16, an atom of sulphur 32, an atom of copper 64, an atom of silver 108, an atom of gold 197, and so on. But more correct measurements showed that these figures were not quite exact, and the fraction of inexactness killed the theory.

Long before the end of the nineteenth century students were looking wistfully to the ether for some explanation of the mystery. It was the veiled statue of Isis in the scientific world, and it resolutely kept its veil in spite of all progress. The "upper and limpid air" of the Greeks, the cosmic ocean of Giordano Bruno, was now an established reality. It was the vehicle that bore the terrific streams of energy from star to planet across the immense reaches of s.p.a.ce. As the atoms of matter lay in it, one thought of the crystal forming in its mother-lye, or the star forming in the nebula, and wondered whether the atom was not in some such way condensed out of the ether. By the last decade of the century the theory was confidently advanced--notably by Lorentz and Larmor--though it was still without a positive basis. How the basis was found, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, may be told very briefly.

Sir William Crookes had in 1874 applied himself to the task of creating something more nearly like a vacuum than the old air-pumps afforded.

When he had found the means of reducing the quant.i.ty of gas in a tube until it was a million times thinner than the atmosphere, he made the experiment of sending an electric discharge through it, and found a very curious result. From the cathode (the negative electric point) certain rays proceeded which caused a green fluorescence on the gla.s.s of the tube. Since the discharge did not consist of the atoms of the gas, he concluded that it was a new and mysterious substance, which he called "radiant matter." But no progress was made in the interpretation of this strange material. The Crookes tube became one of the toys of science--and the lamp of other investigators.

In 1895 Rontgen drew closer attention to the Crookes tube by discovering the rays which he called X-rays, but which now bear his name. They differ from ordinary light-waves in their length, their irregularity, and especially their power to pa.s.s through opaque bodies. A number of distinguished physicists now took up the study of the effect of sending an electric discharge through a vacuum, and the particles of "radiant matter" were soon identified. Sir J. J. Thomson, especially, was brilliantly successful in his interpretation. He proved that they were tiny corpuscles, more than a thousand times smaller than the atom of hydrogen, charged with negative electricity, and travelling at the rate of thousands of miles a second. They were the "electrons" in which modern physics sees the long-sought const.i.tuents of the atom.

No sooner had interest been thoroughly aroused than it was announced that a fresh discovery had opened a new shaft into the underworld. Sir J. J. Thomson, pursuing his research, found in 1896 that compounds of uranium sent out rays that could penetrate black paper and affect the photographic plate; though in this case the French physicist, Becquerel, made the discovery simultaneously' and was the first to publish it. An army of investigators turned into the new field, and sought to penetrate the deep abyss that had almost suddenly disclosed itself. The quickening of astronomy by Galilei, or of zoology by Darwin, was slight in comparison with the stirring of our physical world by these increasing discoveries. And in 1898 M. and Mme. Curie made the further discovery which, in the popular mind, obliterated all the earlier achievements.

They succeeded in isolating the new element, radium, which exhibits the actual process of an atom parting with its minute const.i.tuents.

The story of radium is so recent that a few lines will suffice to recall as much as is needed for the purpose of this chapter. In their study of the emanations from uranium compounds the Curies were led to isolate the various elements of the compounds until they discovered that the discharge was predominantly due to one specific element, radium. Radium is itself probably a product of the disintegration of uranium, the heaviest of known metals, with an atomic weight some 240 times greater than that of hydrogen. But this ma.s.sive atom of uranium has a life that is computed in thousands of millions of years. It is in radium and its offspring that we see most clearly the const.i.tution of matter.