146 The American Geologist. February, 1892 
To the publication of +‘ World Life” may be ascribed the intro- 
duction to the reading world of the new science of comparative 
geology or planetology. |The domain which Alexander Winchell 
then entered had never before been trodden by human foot, save 
where here and there one and another had stepped across its line 
and had left his few footprints on the surface of the untraveled 
wilderness. Carefully mapping all these scattered and divergent 
tracks, he delimited the known, and starting from this base, he 
carried as by an initial triangulation, his original and independent in- 
vestigations into the unknown beyond. Or, changing the figure, 
the known laws’ of physics furnished a sure and safe basis of 
reasoning, and combined with the observations of the astrono- 
mer, enabled him to venture off the firm ground of sense into 
that region of speculation—not of fancy—that was 
Neither sea, nor yood dry land, a dark 
Illimitable ocean, without bound, 
Without dimension, where length, breadth and hight, 
And time and place are lost: 
The realm of Chaos and Old Night. 
—Milton. 
In this chaotic region he has laid the foundations of a new em- 
a science that shall one day read to us the 
pire—a new science 
history of the planets and the stars—the science of astro-geology, 
as he himself has happily termed it. 
The conceptions which +*World Life” brings before the reader 
are such as beggar the loftiest and wildest fictions of eastern or 
western fancy, and forcibly illustrate the beautiful words of 
Playfair that ‘‘Reason can sometimes go where imagination dares 
not follow.” 
Dealing with masses immeasurable, with zons incaleulable and 
with conditions of temperature, pressure, etc., totally incompre- 
hensible, he pictures before his readers the beginnings of being, 
the universe in its birth, and depicts the evolution of the various 
spheres through their periods of incandescent youth and cool ma- 
turity, to their ultimate extinction in cold and darkness-—a des- 
tiny inevitable to worlds that move. Schiller sings, in his ‘Gods 
of Greece:” 
Sure as the pendulum’s dead beat, 
Mere slaves to gravity and heat. 
The theme was a congenial one, and the author revelled among 
