138 SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 



the steam would begin to condense, and soon the 

 surface of the world would show lakes and seas of 

 hot water. Dr Osmond Fisher has suggested 

 that the bed of the Pacific Ocean is the scar left 

 where the Moon was torn off. 



All this time the Earth must have been the 

 scene of continual cataclysms. Think of the 

 molten mass seething and surging as it spun ! 

 How often must its incipient crust have been 

 cracked and broken by the volcanoes below, by 

 the tugging of the Moon and Sun above, by the 

 tidal waves of the turbulent ocean of steam ! 

 Think, later on, of the hot rain, of the wild steam- 

 ing seas, of the continual earthquakes in the con- 

 tracting, crumpling, unstable crust ! It must have 

 been a pandemonium ! 



Reclus {The Earth) gives the following vigor- 

 ous description of the beginnings of ocean and 

 atmosphere : " When the temperature was lowered 

 sufficiently to enable them to pass from a 

 gaseous to a liquid state, metals and other sub- 

 stances would fall down in a fiery rain on the 

 terrestrial lava. Next, the steam, confined entirely 

 to the higher regions of the gaseous mass, would 

 be condensed into an immense layer of clouds, 

 incessantly furrowed by lightning. Drops of 

 water, the commencement of the atmospheric 

 ocean, would begin to fall down towards the 



