NOTES BY THE EDITOR. XIH 



letting us into the secrets of the cosmos, showing the constituents 

 of the most remote planets. A very bold theory has recently been 

 promulgated ('* Atlantic Monthly," February, 18G9) on the origin 

 of the solar system, in which the author concludes as follows : 

 •* The earth is progressing by excessively slow changes toward 

 the solar and nebulous condition. Its history is a repetition of tlie 

 solar, and a time must arrive when the surface, becoming incan- 

 descent, will be obscured only by casual dark pits in a brilliant 

 atmosphere, — a souvenir of the present darkness of the crust ; yet 

 during a certain period, within fixed limits of gravitating force and 

 heat of mass, the human race may continue to exist ; progressing, 

 we may suppose, in force and fineness of organization. The race 

 will perish, perhaps, in the order of nature, by failure or insutfieient 

 number of offspring, a principal cause of the extinction of superior 

 races. The earth must become lone and voiceless long before the 

 incandescence of the crust. Science may follow it into the condi- 

 tion of an attendant star, and then of an expanding nebula." He 

 discards the popular hypothesis of an earth ** gradually cooled 

 from incandescence," and considers the earth as having grown 

 larger and warmer from age to age. " The earth," says he, '♦ began 

 as a small, cold, dark body, whose mass has been, and is gradually 

 increasing by accretion of meteoric matter from space ; with its 

 mass its heat has increased, the additions to the surface sustaining 

 and increasing the heat of the centre." 



No less progressive has been the science of pre-historio Archaeol- 

 ogy. In the words of Dr. Hooker: — "This science, including 

 as it does the origin of language and of art, has been the latest 

 to rise of a series of luminaries that have dispelled the mists of 

 ages and replaced time-honored traditions by scientific truths. 

 Astronomy first snatched the torch from the hands of dogmatic 

 teachers, tore up the letter and cherished the spirit of the law. 

 Geology next followed, but not till two centuries had elapsed, 

 nor indeed, till this our day, in divesting religious teaching of 

 many cobwebs of scientific error ; it has told us that animal and 

 vegetable life preceded the appearance of man on the globe not 

 by days but by myriads of years. And, last of all, this new 

 science proclaims man himself to have inhabited the earth for, 

 perhaps, many thousands of years before the historic period, and 

 now offers to lead us where man has hitherto not ventured to 

 tread. Each fresh discovery concerning pre-historic man is as a 

 pier built on some rock exposed in the sea of time, and from 



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