PART THIRD.

Paradise Found, by William F. Warren, [1885], at sacred-texts.com

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CHAPTER I.

THE TESTIMONY OF GEOGONY, OR THE SCIENCE OF THE ORIGIN OF THE EARTH.

Les lois générales de la géogénie favorisent d’une façon remarquable l’hypothèse dont nous venons d’ebaucher les traits.—Count Saporta.

Could it once be proven that the Arctic terminus of the earth has always been the ice-bound region which it now is, and which for thousands of years it has been, it would of course be useless to entertain for a moment the hypothesis that the cradle of the human race was there located. Probably the popular impression that from the beginning of the world the far North has been the region of unendurable cold has been one of the chief reasons why our hypothesis is so late in claiming attention. At the present time, however, so far as this difficulty is concerned, scientific studies have abundantly prepared the way for the new theory.

That the earth is a slowly cooling body is a doctrine now all but universally accepted. In saying this we say nothing for or against the so-called nebular hypothesis of the origin of the world, for both friends and foes of this unproven hypothesis believe in what is termed the secular cooling or refrigeration of the earth. All authorities in this field hold and teach that the time was when the slowly solidifying planet was too hot to support any form of life, and that only at some particular time in the cooling

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process was there a temperature reached which was adapted to the necessities of living things.

On what portion of the earth's surface, now, would this temperature first be reached? Or would it everywhere be reached at the same time?

These are most interesting questions, and the writer has often marveled that in scientific treatises on the cooling globe he could nowhere find them formally discussed. Granting, however, a uniform interior heat and a uniform loss of it in the mode of superficial radiation in all directions into space, it is certain that if these were the only factors in the problem the cooling process would affect every part of the surface in a uniform manner, and we might confidently infer that the temperature compatible with organic life was reached at the same time at all points of the earth's surface. But the factors named are not the only ones of the problem. In those far-off geologic ages the heat received from the great central furnace of our system, the sun, cannot have been less than at the present time. Some astronomers and geologists claim that it was greater. ¹ In any case, therefore, as early as the time when the earth's atmosphere became penetrable by the rays of the sun, local differences of temperature must have been produced at the base of the atmosphere, whether the body of the globe was as yet crusted over or not. Then as now, viewed apart from air and water currents, every particular spot on the surface of the globe must have had a temperature determined, first by the fixed and uniform inherent heat of the earth-mass, and secondly by the varying quantity of heat received from the sun. But

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the difference between the solar heat received at a point under the equator and that received at a point at the pole cannot have been less in those ages than at the present time; and this incessant increment of the equatorial heat of the earth by the direct rays of the sun suggests at once the portions of the globe to which we must look if we would find the regions which first became cool enough to sustain organic life. Then as now the polar regions must have been cooler than the equatorial, and hence, as far as the teachings of theoretical geogony can be trusted, the conclusion is inevitable that there, to wit, in the polar regions, life first became possible. ¹

The bearing of this result upon our central thesis is at once obvious. We asked the geologist this question: "Is the hypothesis of a primeval polar Eden admissible?" Looking at the slowly cooling earth alone, he replies, "Eden conditions have probably at one time or another been found everywhere upon the surface of the earth. Paradise may have been anywhere." Looking at the cosmic environment, however, he adds, "But while Paradise may have been anywhere, the first portions of the earth's surface sufficiently cool to present the conditions of Eden life were assuredly at the Poles."

Footnotes

58:1 See Winchell, World-Life, pp. 484-490.

59:1 The similar or identical reasonings of Professor Philip Spiller were unknown to me when the foregoing was written. See the following: Die Weltschöpfung vom Standpunkte der heutigen Wissenschaft. Mit neuen Untersuchungen, 1868, 2d ed., 1873. Die Entstehung der Welt and die Einheit der Naturkräfte. Populäre Kosmogonie, 1872. Die Urkraft des Weltalls nach ihrem Wesen and Wirken auf allen Naturgebieten. Berlin, 1879. In Professor Otto Kuntze's latest work, Phytogeogenesis: Die vorweltliche Entwickelung der Erdkruste and der Pflanzen, Leipsic, 1884, I also find traces of a recognition of the truth above set forth. See pp. 51, 52, 53, 60, of the work.