The late Professor Hayden, a distinguished official of the Coast
Survey, held disquieting views regarding the significance of certain
seismic and meteorological phenomena, or, as they say in English,
earthquakes and storms. It is the professor’s notion that stupendous
changes are going on in the center of the earth. As the human race
does not live in that locality, it may be thought that these changes
are insufficiently important to engage the attention of the public
press. Unfortunately, we are not permitted to entertain that pleasing
illusion, for the learned scientist has traced an obscurely marked, but
indubitable connection between them and the “blizzards” and cyclones of
the Northwest. In a manner not clearly explained, the “central changes”
of which the earthquake is the outward and visible sign, beget also
“a nipping and an eager air” singularly distasteful to the Montana
cattle-grower, and afflict Dakota with that kind of zephyr which, as a
nameless humorist has averred, “just sits on its hind legs and howls.”
Here, again, we are denied the double gratification of seeing the
Northwestern States and Territories devastated and feeling ourselves
secure from the same mischance. Professor Hayden—whose good will is
unquestionable—had no hope of confining these frigorific activities
to the region of their birth and overcoming them by some scientific
_coup de main_, as the man beat the gout by herding it into his
great toe, then cutting off the toe. No; the “blizzard,” both still and
sparkling, will spread all over the globe with increasing intensity
and vehemence, to the no small discomfort of the unacclimated, though
greatly, no doubt, to the innocent glee of Esquimau, Innuit, Aleut and
other natives of those “thrilling regions”
Where the playful Polar bear
Nips the hunter unaware.
In short, as the professor puts it, “scientific men here and abroad
concur in the opinion that we are approaching an extremely interesting
period.”
We are not left in doubt as to the precise nature of the disasters
which an “interesting period” may naturally be expected to entail; it
is strongly intimated that the period is to be “another glacial age.”
The one with which we were last favored, not longer ago, according to
some authorities, than a matter of twenty thousand years, appears to
have accomplished its purposes of erosion and extinction imperfectly.
Its vast layers of ice, moving from the Pole toward the Equator,
planed off the surface of the earth so badly that such asperities as
the Rocky Mountains, the Alps and the Himalayas may be supposed to
offend the mechanical eye of Nature and make her desirous to go over
them again. The fact that the now temperate and torrid zones are still
infested by men and other beasts is evidence that the cave-dwellers
of the pre-glacial age were a tougher lot than the good old dame had
supposed. In her next attempt she will probably pile on more ice and
give it a superior momentum, at the same time heralding its southward
encroachment with a temperature that will be such a terror as to turn
the citrus belt white in a single night and drive it out altogether.
Having been encouraged by Professor Hayden to nourish anticipations
of an interesting period pregnant with such pleasing possibilities as
these, we are inexpressibly disappointed to have him say, as he does,
that the operation of the great “central changes” to which we are to be
indebted for all this is so slow that it may be a thousand years, or
even longer, before they get to their work with perceptible efficacy.
Of course one must recognize the stern necessity that dominates the
scientific prophet—he has to carry the fulfilment so far into the
future as to avoid the melancholy fate of short-range prophets, like
Zadkiel; and therein we discern the true difference between the
scientist and the impostor.
Nevertheless, in a matter of such pith and moment it would have been
agreeable to be permitted to hope that these fascinating events would
begin to occur in our day, and their author (if one may reverently
venture to call him so) would have done a graceful thing if he had so
far departed from the strictly scientific method as to assure us that
some of us, at least, might reasonably expect to be frozen into the
advancing wall of ice, like the famous Siberian mastodon of blessed
memory, and become objects of interest to the possible Haydens of a
later dispensation. As he has denied us the gratification which he
could so cheaply have given to our curiosity and ambition, one feels
justified in denouncing him as a miscreant and a viper.