July i8, 1901] 



NA TURE 



277 



COSMOGONY AND EVOLUTION. 



E7ttsiehen und Vergehen der Welt ah Kosmischer 



Kreizprozess. Auf Grund des pyknotischen Subsfanz- 



begriffes. Zweite und er~ioeiterfe Auflage. Von. J. G. 



Vogt. Pp. viii + 1005. (Leipzig: Ernst Wiest, 1901.) 



A REVIEWER can scarcely be expected to read the 

 whole of the thousand and odd pages which Herr 

 Vogt has required to express his views on the origin and 

 decay of the world. .A.s one looks down the table of 

 contents, he feels that it would require a mathematician, 

 a chemist, a physicist, a biologist rolled into one to do 

 justice to the many various subjects which here come 

 under notice, and if oppressed with this view he begins 

 with the "methodologische" introduction and struggles 

 with the adjectives, " fearfully and wonderfully made," he 

 may be tempted to turn for a little relaxation to the 

 " explanatory illustrations " scattered through the text. 

 One of these (p. 260) is to explain the genesis of the solar 

 system. The author gives some account of the cos- 

 mogony of Kant and Laplace, and recalls some of the 

 objections which have been urged against these views. 

 He is particularly severe on the insufficient explanation 

 offered for the density of the planets closest to the sun. 

 Saturn, he states, retired from the ring-making process 

 when the mass of the ring was 1/118 of its own mass ; 

 while in the case of Mercury the sun continued to pro- 

 duce a ring the mass of which is only 1/4,316,550. 

 The evident distaste of Saturn to form rings of smaller 

 mass leads the author to abandon the ring hypothesis 

 altogether and to offer an alternative theory. He con- 

 ceives spheres of operation (Wirkungssphare) and De- 

 formierungssysteme (not so easily translated). But if we 

 will imagine three circles, the centres of which form an 

 equilateral triangle and each of the circles touches two 

 others, the circles will form " Deformierungssysteme," 

 ,,while the enclosed triangular space bounded by the 

 three circles is a "field of operation." Now in the 

 small space near the points of contact we get the smaller 

 planets formed, Mercury and the earth on one side and 

 Mars and Venus on the other, each planet touching two 

 circles and the next larger planet. Jupiter in this way 

 has room for his giant bulk, pushing Saturn a little on 

 one side, but otherwise is not inconveniently crowded. 

 Of course, the whole merit of such a cosmogony depends 

 upon the " Deformierungssysteme," and for the manner 

 of working these the reader must be referred to the 

 book itself The second diagram (p. 949) is to illustrate 

 the precession of the equinoxes. Here one would say 

 there is no room for imagination ; we have to do with 

 a problem in rigid dynamics which is susceptible of but 

 one explanation. But if any one thinks this, he has not 

 reckoned with Herr Vogt, who, as a man of ideas, begins 

 at the beginning. Before attempting to explain the 

 cause of any modification in the position of the polar 

 axis it is necessary, he tells us, to understand the laws 

 which determine the constant position of that axis. These 

 laws he proceeds to unfold on "phoronomische" prin- 

 ciples, and in his endeavour to follow the author in these 

 same principles the student will be not a little startled 

 to find it necessary to project the plane of the Milky 

 Way on a diagram to explain precession. But he will 

 probably not read beyond the following sentence : — 

 NO. 1655, VOL. 64] 



" The North Pole describes a circle on the sky in 

 about 26,000 years. We can call this circle the projection 

 circle of the absolute orbit of the earth, therefore in- 

 directly the solar orbit, and denote these 26,000 years 

 as the period of the sun in its orbit." 



After this one is not surprised to learn that the sun will 

 have a more or less intensive effect on the tension of the 

 aether according to its position in this orbit, and thus to be 

 led to a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon of 

 the Ice Age. 



Herr Vogt is to be congratulated on having found a 

 publisher willing to express these views in a book of 

 handsome appearance, and when one learns that an 

 earlier edition has long been exhausted he is tempted 

 to doubt whether German education is of the elevated 



character that is sometimes represented. 



W. E. P. 



OUR BOOK SHELF. 

 The Geolos;ical History of the Rivers of East Yorkshire. 



By F. R. Cowper Reed, M.A., F.G.S. Pp. vi-Ho3. 



(London : C. J. Clay and Sons, 1901.) Price 4^. net. 

 Since Jukes, some forty years ag;o, explained how rivers 

 cut through escarpments, the origin of their valleys has 

 been well understood in a general way. Much, however, 

 remained to be learnt about the development of particular 

 rivers and the changes which have brought about 

 present drainage areas ; and these subjects have been so 

 attentively and successfully studied by American geo- 

 logists, notably by Prof. W. M. Davis, that their 

 methods of interpretation have been followed by several 

 observers in this country. The present work by Mr. 

 Cowper Reed gained the Sedgwick Prize Essay for 1890, 

 and is a capital exposition of the evolution of the rivers 

 in East Yorkshire. After giving a general account of 

 the various formations, he points out that the origmal 

 " constructional surface " on which the present river 

 system was initiated, was a plain formed by the Chalk and 

 other Upper Cretaceous strata, and was upraised in early 

 Tertiary times and perhaps partially eroded during the 

 uplift. Having a greater elevation in the west, the direct 

 ancestors of the present rivers took rise from the higher 

 grounds and flowed eastwards, the Tees and Esk forming 

 one river, the Swale and Ure flowing also direct to the 

 coast, which formerly extended much further eastward, 

 and the Nidd, Wharfe and Aire uniting and flowing out 

 by the Humber. A long period of subaerial denudation 

 followed the initiation of these consequent streams, there 

 was a gradual lowering of the area, and there arose the 

 subsequent river Ouse, which captured the Swale and 

 Ure, the Nidd and Wharfe,. conducting their waters into 

 the Humber drainage. Towards the close of the Oligo- 

 cene period, when the area had been nearly reduced to 

 base-level by the formation of an extensive peneplain 

 and the rivers had attained old age, there was consider- 

 able upheaval, accompanied by further movements along 

 pre-Cretaceous lines of flexure, especially in the Moor- 

 land range of the Jurassic region. The rivers thereby 

 regained youth and activity, their directions were locally 

 modified, and thus were produced some of the main fea- 

 tures in the present topography. Further changes, how- 

 ever, led to other modifications : there was depression 

 towards the close of the Pliocene period, and subsequent 

 elevation in Glacial times. With regard to the Boulder 

 Clay the author judiciously remarks that "the land-ice 

 theory appears to offer fewer difficulties than any others 

 and to explain matters more satisfactorily." In any case 

 large tracts, excepting some of the higher grounds, were 

 buried beneath drift deposits, and the valleys were 

 choked up. When the land had lost its icy mantle, some 



