402 THE WORLD MACHINE 



Chaldean tradition of a Garden of Eden, the Deluge and the 

 rest, the basis of the Mosaic system, is another. It was the latter 

 which survived among the peoples of Europe when Hellenic science 

 had gone down, and until the later years of the seventeenth 

 century. After the generation of Cassini and Newton it could 

 no longer satisfy any rational mind. 



The telescope had cast the world adrift ; cosmos seemed to 

 have no whence and no whither. It produced a sort of an 

 intellectual simoon. When the tumult had somewhat subsided, 

 when it finally became clear that the facts were impassable 

 rocks, speculative minds began to cast for an anchorage. If 

 the Chaldean tradition was no longer tenable, still was there 

 never a creation at all ? Did the universe, and especially that 

 little part which is ours, for ever exist as it is ? 



We know that the speculative brain of Newton sought 

 vainly in the phenomena which he had investigated so deeply, 

 for some sort of a clue. Too heavily weighted by prevailing 

 dogma, too deeply occupied perhaps during the period in which 

 his mind was really active that is to say, before his mental 

 illness with the immediate mechanical theory of planetary 

 movement, he could discover no opening. The problem passed 

 to a newer generation, upon whom tradition had less weight. 



Almost contemporaneously with the Principia, Fontenelle 

 had rescued from oblivion the glowing fancies of Bruno, and 

 speculated delightfully upon the plurality of systems and worlds. 

 Huyghens' reveries upon the same subject, published posthu- 

 mously, came ten or twelve years later. Leibnitz about the 

 same time had conjectured that the planets are extinct suns; 

 he had seen that the flattened shape of the earth indicated 

 beyond peradventure that it had once been in a fluid condition. 

 He divined that it had once been a molten mass. In 1734 

 Daniel Bernouilli had undertaken some remarkable calculations, 

 demonstrating on the calculus of probabilities that the solar 

 system could not have been the product of chance. This was 

 the state of speculation when the subject was taken up by 

 Burton. 



It is to this great naturalist that we owe the first attempt 

 upon thoroughly scientific principles to conceive the origin of 

 the globe on which we dwell. His ideas were contained in a 

 volume on the Theory of the Earth, first published it 1745. 

 Four years after it was incorporated as the first volume of his 



