It was "the divine Kepler," as Professor Shaler calls him, who looked
upon the earth as animated in the fashion of an animal. "To him this
world is so endowed with activities that it is to be accounted alive."
But his critics looked upon this fancy of Kepler's as proof of a
disordered mind.
Now I read in a work of George Darwin's (son of the great naturalist) on
the tides that the earth in many ways behaves more like a living
organism than like a rigid insensate sphere. Its surface throbs and
palpitates and quivers and yields to pressure as only living organisms
do. The tides can hardly be regarded as evidences of its breathing, as
Kepler thought they could, but they are proof of how closely it is held
in the clasp of the heavenly forces. It is like an apple on the vast
sidereal tree, that has mellowed and ripened with age. Our moon is no
doubt as dead as matter can be. It is hard to fancy its surface yielding
to our tread as does that of the earth. Then we know that the absence of
air and water on it is proof that it cannot be endowed with what we call
life. George Darwin tells us that when we walk on the ground we warp and
bend the surface very much as we might bend or dent the epidermis of a
colossal pachyderm. He and his brother devised an instrument by which
the slight fluctuations of the ground, as we move over it, could be
measured. The instrument was so delicate that it revealed the difference
of effect produced by the same pressure at seven feet and at six feet
from the instrument! More than that, the instrument revealed the
throbbing and agitations which the ground is undergoing at all times.
They found that minute earthquakes, or microseisms, as the Italians call
them, are occurring constantly.
Another instrument has been invented called the microphone, which
translates this earth's movements into sound--its tremors and
agitations become audible. This microphone, when placed in a cave twenty
feet below the surface, and carefully protected by means of a carpet
from any accidental disturbance in its immediate vicinity, revealed what
is called "natural telluric phenomena; such as roarings, explosions,
occurring isolated or in volleys, and metallic or bell-like sounds."
"The noises sometimes become intolerably loud," especially on one
occasion in the middle of the night, half an hour before a sensible
earthquake.
Our apparently impassive and slumbering old planet evidently has dreams
we know little of.
From Professor Shaler's "Nature and Man in America" I get an impression
which again deepens my feeling of something half human about our lucky
planet, at least something progressive and unequal, like life itself.
Shaler finds that organic development in the Northern Hemisphere is more
advanced, by a whole geologic period, than in the Southern, with Europe
at the head and Australia the greatest laggard. The animal life of
Australia is much like that of Europe in the Jurassic period, while both
Asia and Africa possess forms, such as elephants, and tigers, and lions,
which abounded in Europe in Tertiary times. Hence the Northern
Hemisphere is more like the head of the beast, and the Southern more
like the viscera. The Northern races easily dominate the Southern. The
flowering of civilization is in the North. It is very certain that man
originated north of the equator. I think that one need not expect that
the achievements of man in Australia, or in South America, will rival
the achievements of man nearer the magnetic pole of the earth.