26 THE WORLD MACHINE 



life of the world it is the same. What the revelations of the 

 telescope had implied, the advance of geognosy, of earth-know- 

 ledge, has confirmed ; and to the conception of a universe 

 immeasurably vast, we add at length that of an earth im- 

 measurably old. 



But if the calculations of the good Archbishop slightly erred, 

 still did it never have a beginning at all ? By an instinct born 

 of familiar associations the mind refuses to accept such a con- 

 clusion, and stirred by its restless fancy, will voyage where 

 charts fail. It was from inquiry in another field that a clue 

 came. 



If the earth is a ball and we live at the surface, what is 

 inside the drum ? Is it hollow, and at the poles are there 

 openings to an interior world a fascinating world, perhaps, of 

 gnomes and genii and dragons and elves and all the wonderful 

 menagerie that was banished from the world of men ? The 

 fire-spouting cones of the volcanoes scattered here and there 

 over the earth suggest that it might be rather too warm. The 

 eruptions of jEtna and Vesuvius, Krakatoa and Mont Pelee, 

 seem to indicate that the inside is filled with molten rock. This 

 appears to be confirmed when men mine into the ground and 

 find the temperature increases as they go deeper and deeper. 



We live, then, on a crust that spans a glowing lake of fire, 

 and on a crust that is very thin. If we took a sheet of paper 

 and pasted it over the surface of a good-sized melon, we should 

 have the relative proportions. 



All this is strangely different from the early ideas of the 

 race. This crust must have been formed by the cooling of this 

 fiery mass. In cooling the mass would shrink. The earth 

 may have once been a far larger body than now. Reasoning 

 from the known effects of radiation and of attraction, we 

 prolong the vision backward and see in a diffused fire-mist the 

 beginning of the world ! A time was, perhaps, when the earth 

 was part of the sun, when the sun indeed stretched out beyond 

 the present confines of the solar system. Through the ages 

 it has been shrinking, throwing off planets by times, and by its 

 shrinkage flooding the world with warmth and light. So in its 

 turn the earth parted with the moon, and in that cold and 

 lifeless orb we have a presentment of what must one day be 

 the fate of our globe as well. 



