190 REV. A. IRVING, D.SC., B.A., ON 
of that atmosphere (as the result of further cooling), and the 
increasing intensity of the light-giving power of the central orb 
of our system. I have discussed all this elsewhere.* Here it 
may suffice to quote the co.clusion at which Lord Kelvin (the 
“Prince” of Scientists) arrived after many years spent in 
investigating this profound problem. Towards the end of his 
address to the Victoria Institute on “The Age of the Earth” in 
1897t Kelvin remarked :— 
““Whatever may have been the true history of our atmosphere, 
it seems certain that, if sunlight was ready, the earth was also ready, 
within a few hundreds of centuries after the rocky consolidation of 
the earth’s surfare. But was the sun ready? ‘The well-founded 
dynamical theory of the sun’s heat, worked out and discussed by 
Helmholtz, Newcomb, and myself says No, if the consolidation of 
the earth took place so long ago as fifty million years; the solid 
earth must in that case have waited another twenty or thirty 
million years for the sun to be anything like as warm as at present. 
If the consolidation of the earth was finished twenty or twenty-five 
million years ago, the sun was probably ready though not nearly so 
warm as at present; yet warm enough to support some kind of 
vegetable and animal life upon the earth.” 
Not apparently so familiar with these speculations as he 
mivht have been, the satire of Professor Sollast was rather 
cheap. He does me too much honour to suggest that all this is 
merely “ Mr. Irving’s Science,” for it is simply a deduction from 
the science of Lord Kelvin, Helmholtz and Newcomb, three intel- 
lectual giants in the world of physical science (strictu sensw) 
representative of the science of Britain, Germany, and America 
respectively. It raises a suspicion that geological science in 
this country is tainted in some quarters with the pseudoscientitic 
spirit and methods of the “ higher criticism.” 
The teaching of Lord Kelvin has not been, I think, 
materially affected by what we have learned since of the 
recently discovered body radium, which has however revealed 
a mode of storage and transmission of heat energy previously 
* Trans. Vict. Inst. (vol. xxxvii) and Guardian, Oct., Nov., Dec., 1907. 
By the courtesy of Dr. Horace Brown, F.R.S., I have also had an 
opportunity of perusing the MS. of the paper he read before the joint 
sections C and K of the British Association, He agreed with me that 
the effects upon Angiosperms (as in the Kew experiments), are not 
conclusive as to the ettect upon Cryptogams. 
+ Trans. Vict. Inst., vol. xxix (1897). 
t Guardian, Nov. 6th, 1907. 
