lyer 



cisioii 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



548 



2 7 1 . PRAYER CANNOT BENEFIT BY 

 FALSE PRETENSE Preaching to Oneself 

 under Guise of Praying to God. We find 

 many men now facing the consequences to 

 which they have given their intellectual 

 assent, and taking their stand upon the 

 ground that prayer to God has no other 

 value or effect than so far as it may be a 

 good way of preaching to ourselves. It is 

 a useful and helpful exercise for our own 

 spirits, but it is nothing more. But how 

 can they pray who have come to this? Can 

 it ever be useful or helpful to believe a lie? 

 That which has been threatened as the worst 

 of all spiritual evils would then become 

 the conscious attitude of our " religion," 

 the habitual condition of our worship. This 

 must be a bad science, as it is bad re- 

 ligion. It is in violation of a law the high- 

 est known to man the law which insepara- 

 bly connects earnest conviction of the truth 

 in what we do or say with the very foun- 

 tains of all intellectual and moral strength. 

 No accession of force can come to us from 

 doing anything in which we disbelieve. 

 ARGYLL Reign of Law, ch. 2, p. 37. (Burt.) 



* 27O2. PRECESSION OF THE EQUI- 

 NOXES Changes Wrought during That Long 

 Duration Transit oriness of Human Life 

 The Transforming Work of Time. Immense 

 and slow revolution of the skies! What 

 events occur on our globe during the course 

 of one of these periods ! The last time that 

 the pole occupied the place which it does to- 

 day, 25,765 years ago, none of the present 

 countries existed. None of the nations who 

 dispute to-day for supremacy on the planet 

 had then left the cradle of Nature. Al- 

 ready, doubtless, there were men upon the 

 earth, but the social unions which they 

 formed have left no trace of the degree of 

 civilization to which they had attained, and 

 it is very probable that these uncultured 

 and savage beings were then in the midst of 

 the primitive Stone Age, of which so many 

 proofs have recently been collected. Where 

 ishall we be in our turn when, after another 

 period of equal duration, the pole will have 

 again returned to its present position? 

 Trench, English, Germans, Italians, Span- 

 iards, may then join hands in a common 

 obscurity. None of our contemporary na- 

 tions will have resisted the transforming 

 work of time. Other nations, other lan- 

 guages, other religions will have long since 

 replaced the present state of things. One 

 day a traveler wandering on the banks of 

 the Seine will be attracted by a heap of 

 ruins, seeking the place where Paris had, 

 during so many ages, shed its light. Per- 

 haps he will find the same difficulty in re- 

 covering places formerly famous that the 

 antiquary now finds in identifying the site 

 of Thebes or of Babylon. Our nineteenth 

 century will be then, in antiquity, very 

 much further back than are for us the ages 

 of the Pharaohs and the ancient Egyptian 

 dynasties. A new human race intellectually 



superior to ours will have won its way to 

 the sunlight; and we shall perhaps be very 

 surprised, you and I, O studious and thought- 

 ful readers! to meet each other, side by 

 side blanched and carefully labeled skele- 

 tons installed in a glass case of a mu- 

 seum, by a naturalist of the two hundred 

 and seventy-sixth century, as curious speci- 

 mens of an ancient race, rather wild, but 

 already endowed with a certain aptitude for 

 the study of the sciences. Vanity of vani- 

 ties ! O noisy ambitions of a day, who pass 

 our life disputing about tinsel, about empty 

 titles and many-colored decorations, ask 

 yourselves what philosophy must think of 

 your ephemeral vainglory when it compares 

 your puerile rivalries with the majestic 

 work of Nature, which bears us all to the 

 same destiny! FLAMMARION Popular As- 

 tronomy, bk. i, ch. 4, p. 41. (A.) 



2703. PRECIOUS DESTROYED BY 

 WORTBXESS Weeds Kill Pasturage. The 

 most noxious weed in New Zealand appears, 

 . . . to be the Hypochceris radicata, a 

 coarse, yellow-flowered composite not uncom- 

 mon in our meadows and waste places. This 

 has been introduced with grass seeds from 

 England, and is very destructive. It is 

 stated that excellent pasture was in three 

 years destroyed by this weed, which abso- 

 lutely displaced every other plant on the 

 ground. WALLACE Darwinism, ch. 2, p. 20. 

 (Hum., 1889.) 



2704. PRECIOUSNESS OF LOWLY 

 LIFE Biology Values the Humblest. It is a 

 well - established fact in biology that the 

 humblest creature is just as important a 

 link in the chain of creation as the highest 

 mammal. The higher forms are so well 

 known, and so little has been found out 

 concerning some of the more lowly creatures, 

 that the naturalist is very glad to leave the 

 ninety-and-nine and go into the wilderness 

 to seek the one that is lost. MASON Origins 

 of Invention, ch. 12, p. 413. (S., 1899.) 



2705. PRECIPITATION OF MINERALS 

 KEEPS WATER PURE Rocks Now Forming 

 in the Rhone, the Adriatic, and the Mediter- 

 ranean. The Rhone, the Po, the Nile, and 

 many hundred minor streams and springs 

 pour annually into the Mediterranean large 

 quantities of carbonate of lime, together 

 with iron, magnesia, silica, alumina, sulfur, 

 and other mineral ingredients in a state of 

 chemical solution. To explain why the in- 

 flux of this matter does not alter the com- 

 position of this sea has never been regarded 

 as a difficulty; for it is known that cal- 

 careous rocks are forming in the delta of 

 the Rhone, in the Adriatic, on the coast of 

 Asia Minor, and in other localities. Pre- 

 cipitation is acknowledged to be the means 

 whereby the surplus mineral matter is dis- 

 posed of, after the consumption of a certain 

 portion in the secretions of testacea, zoo- 

 phytes, and other marine animals. LYELL 

 Principles of Geology, bk. ii, ch. 20, p. 335. 

 (A., 1854.) 



