2o6 



NA TURE 



\Jan. lo, 1878 



boniferous limestone rocks appears even under the mass 

 of Ararat, and has drawn the inference from his wanderings 

 in that region, that in the beginning of the Upper Car- 

 boniferous Limestone period a great continental upheaval 

 took place during which the Armenian region received its 

 first outlines. The land thus raised he believes to have 

 remained above water until, in the course of the Cretaceous 

 period, it so far sank as to become an island, and continued 

 in this condition even into Pliocene times, when the whole 

 of that region became involved in another vast continental 

 upheaval to which the final modelling of the Armenian 

 highlands was due. These great terrestrial movements 

 were accompanied by the outbreak of volcanic action. 

 Abich regards the diabase, diorite, and porphyry rocks as 

 having been abundantly erupted during the Jurassic 

 period and to have played an important part in the forma- 

 tion of the mountain masses, especially in the Lower 

 Caucasus. To late Tertiary times, however, belong the 

 trachytic and doleritic lavas which have been poured 

 forth on so colossal a scale as to form such mountains as 

 Elbruz, Kasbek, Ala Goz, and the two Ararats. 



In Mr. Bryce's recently published volume (to which atten- 

 tion has already been drawn in Nature) we have a record 

 of the latest and probably the most daring ascent of Mount 

 Ararat. Thcugh not a profesied geologist he has h .d a 

 geological training, and has seen much of many lands, alike 

 m the Old World and jn the New. It was not to make out 

 any obscure point in the structure of Ararat that he bent 

 his steps towards that little known mountain. But he had 

 climbed many a peak in Europe, and he no doubt longed 

 to set foot upon the high places of another continent. 

 So he made a pilgrimage to the heights of Armenia, with 

 no thought, however, of writing a book about his journey. 

 The volume he has just published has been partly wrung 

 from him by the importunity of friends, who reasonably 

 supposed that the world might be as much interested as 

 they in knowing more about Ararat. In its charmangly 

 fresh and graphic pages one gels such a living picture of 

 the mountain as cannot be gained from any of the geolo- 

 gical memoirs. From long experience of mountain 

 climbing his eyes are so keen and so trained, while his 

 pen is so facile and vivid that we can mount with him as 

 he gees warily over each lava-current, rubbish-cone, 

 and snow slope. We feel the sharp thin air of the 

 mountain as it blows through his narrative. We join in 

 his quiet chuckle as he halts at a solitary piece of wood 

 far up on the cone and irreverently detaches a fragment 

 for the inspection of those who cannot personally discover 

 whether the true ark still rests on the top of Ararat. And 

 we can sympathise with his awe as he stood among the 

 clouds alone on the summit of the mysterious mountain. 

 It is not for any new scientific facts so much as for the 

 vivid sketch of the general aspect of the huge volcanic 

 mass that his book has an interest to geologists, 



A vignette of Ararat forms the frontispiece of the 

 volume, which is here reproduced. In the middle dis- 

 tance is shown the alluvial plain of the Araxes. Below 

 the snowy cone and icy cliffs of the Greater Ararat a 

 deep cleft, or recess appears with huge cliffs somewhat 

 like the Val del Bove of Etna, and no doubt due to some 

 of the volcanic explosions of the mountain. On the sky- 

 line of this slope, towards the base of the larger cone, 

 some of the late cinder-cones and craters appear. Some 

 of these are still so fresh and perfect that they look as if 

 they had been active only the other day and might blaze 

 forth again to-morrow. The graceful outline of the 

 Lesser Ararat rises on the left, ARCH. Geikie 



AGE OF 



IHE SUN IN RELATION 

 EVOLUTION 



TO 



/^NE of the most formidable objections to the theory 

 ^^ of evolution is the enormous length of time which 

 it demands. On this point Prof. Haeckel, one of the 



highest authorities on the subject, in his " History of 

 Creation," has the following : — " Darwin's theory, as well 

 that of Lyell, renders the assumption of immense periods 

 absolutely necessary. ... If the theory of development 

 be true at all there must certainly have elapsed immense 

 periods, utterly inconceivable to us, during which the 

 gradual historical development of the animal and vege- 

 table proceeded by the slow transformation of species , . . 

 the periods during which species originated by gradual 

 transmutation, must not be calculated by single centuries, 

 but by hundreds and by millions of centuries. Every 

 process of development is the more intelligible the longer 

 it is assumed to last," 



There are few evolutionists, I presume, who will dis- 

 pute the accuracy of these statements ; but the question 

 arises, does physical science permit the assumption of 

 such enormous periods ? We shall now consider the way 

 in which Prof. Haeckel endeavours to answer this ques- 

 tion and to meet the objections urged against the 

 enormous lapse of time assumed for evolution. 



" I beg leave to remark," he says, " that we have not a 

 single rational ground for conceiving the time requisite 

 to be limited in any way. ... It is absolutely impossible to 

 see what can in any way limit us in assuming long 

 periods of time. . , , From a strictly philosophical point of 

 view it makes no difference whether we hypothetically 

 assume for this process ten millions or ten thousand 

 millions of years, ... In the same way as the distances 

 between the different planetary systems are not calculated 

 by miles but by Sirius-distances, each of which comprises 

 m.illions of miles, so the organic history of the earth must 

 not be calculated by thousands of years, but by palaeon- 

 tological or geological periods, each of which comprises 

 many thousands of years, and perhaps millions or milliards 

 of thousands of years." 



Statements more utterly opposed to the present state of 

 modern science on this subject could hardly well be made. 

 Not only have physicists fixed a limit to the extent of time 

 available to the evolutionist, but ihey have fixed it within 

 very narrow boundaries. 



Every one will admit that the organic history of our 

 globe must have been limited by the age of the sun's heat. 

 The extent of time that the evolutionist is allowed to 

 assume depends, therefore, on the answer to the question, 

 What is the age of the sun's heat ? And this again depends 

 on the ulterior question. From what source has he derived 

 his energy .'' The sun is losing heat at the enormous rate 

 of 7,000 horse-power on every square foot of surface. And 

 were it composed of coal its combustion would not main- 

 tain the present rate of radiation for 5,000 years. Com- 

 bustion, therefore, cannot be the origin of the heat. 



Gravitation is now almost universally appealed to as the 

 only conceivable source from which the sun could have 

 obtained his energy. The contraction theory advocated 

 by Helmholtz is the one generally accepted, but the total 

 amount of work performed by gravitation in the conden- 

 sation of the sun from a nebulous mass to its present 

 size could only have afforded twenty million years' heat 

 at the present rate of radiation. On the assumption that 

 the Sim's density increases towards the centre, a {qw 

 additional million years' heat might be obtained. But on 

 every conceivable supposition gravitation could not have 

 afforded more than twenty or thirty million years' heat. 



Prof. Haeckel may make any assumption he chooses 

 about the age of the sun, but he must not do so in regard 

 to the age of the sun's heat. One who believes it incon- 

 ceivable that matter can either be created or annihilated 

 may be allowed to maintain that the sun existed from all 

 eternity, but he cannot be permitted to as'sume that our 

 luminary has been losing heat from all eternity. 



If 20,000,000 or 30,000,000 years do not suffice for the 

 evolution theory, then either that or the gravitation theory 

 of the origin of the sun's heat will have to b° abandoned. 



In a former paper {Quarterly Journal of Science for 



