372 ANNUAL KEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1910. 



is not likely to be guided by a new fundamental method, but merely 

 by an increased measure of breadth and depth of insight. 



Some of the special features that have entered into former prophe- 

 cies will quite surely disappear and new ones will no doubt be added. 

 The forecasts of prescientific times often made the doom of the earth 

 hinge on some lapse in the conduct of man ; made a physical disaster 

 serve as a moral punishment. But with a truer insight into the 

 basis of moral law and the place of man in nature this anthropic 

 view will no doubt give place to a more consistent conception of 

 sequences in the moral and the physical worlds. 



In the earlier days of the race the backward look was short, and in 

 fitting accord with this the origin of the race and of the earth was 

 put only a few thousand 3^ears before our times. In strict consonance 

 with this the forward look seemed to disclose an end but little ahead. 

 In much the same tenor also the beginning was made chaotic and 

 the end cataclysmic. 



The dawn of the earth sciences was followed by a new forecast, 

 and as the sciences grew this forecast was repeatedly enlarged, re- 

 vised and recast. It was learned that the history of the earth 

 stretches back not merely for thousands, but for millions and tens 

 of millions of years; that the ongoings of the earth are actuated by 

 energies too great to be seriously swerved from their orderly course 

 or brought to an end by the acts of those who dwell upon it; that the 

 march of earth history has a mighty tread whose moving force feels 

 no serious influence from the merits or the lapses of even our potent 

 race. 



The trend of prophetic thought under the inspiration of science in 

 the last century invites a closer review. The ground of forecast lay 

 mainly in the views of the origin of the earth then current, in 

 the course of the earth's past history, and in the trend of those agen- 

 cies that control the conditions of life. The solar system was then 

 thought to have sprung from a gaseous nebula, and the earth, as a 

 member of the system, was assigned a place in the gaseous evolution. 

 It was itself pictured as a fiery gaseous globe. We need not here 

 turn aside to review the special phases of the dominant hypothesis or 

 of the quasi-gaseous meteoritic hypothesis, or pause to pay honor to 

 their great authors, for the sole feature that entered potentially into 

 the shaping of the future of the earth was the gaseo-molten state as- 

 signed the globe at its genetic stage, and in this feature all varieties 

 of these hypotheses essentially concurred. A crude alternative view 

 was, indeed, offered in what was little more than the rough suggestion 

 that the earth might have grown up by the infall of small sporadic 

 bodies, but this did not gain the assent of students of celestial dy- 

 namics familiar with all that is implied by the symmetry of the 

 system. On the contrary, it was held that the rotations of the planets 



