JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS, 29 
THE DARWINIAN THEORY OF THE TIDES. 
Read before the Hamilton Scientific Association. 
BY JOHN A. PATTERSON, M. A. 
We are all in some sense familiar with the phenomena of the 
tides as commonly understood to be the rising and falling of the 
waters of the ocean caused by the attractions of the Sun and Moon. 
‘There come to us many school-day memories when the diagrams in 
our geography book or those drawn on the blackboard by some long 
ago preceptor exhibiting circles with elongated wings illustrated to 
us those diurnal heavings of the bosom of the sea. We may, too, 
have stood beside the shore and have seen— 
‘¢ The Ocean at the bidding of the Moon 
Forever changing with his restless tide.” 
And we may have watched the rising of the little waves smoothing 
down the ruffled sand with their soft white hands, and then the eb- 
bing away following that mysterious pu!l from Sun and Moon which 
has been working from remote zeons of ages. Twice every day, like 
every God-fearing man in the morning and evening, the ocean, being 
God-created, lifts itself to heaven and worships, and twice every day 
after its orison and matin it sinks back to its level and pursues its 
round of daily service or nightly rest. Those who see this every 
day phenomenon never think that wrapt up in this are those eternal 
principles on which the vast problems involving the origin and _his- 
tory not only of our solar system but of other celestial systems 
depend. 
These attractions of Sun and Moon are most easily exhibited in 
their effects on the water that wraps the Earth, and though the Earth 
is comparatively solid, yet it is not perfectly rigid, and therefore it is 
that its shape is even now thus affected, although from their minute- 
ness they may be incapable of registration. But that was not so 
before ‘“‘ the beginning,” when the earth was in her molten or plastic 
condition, and then it was that the strong hands of her parent Sun 
