CONTENTS.

xxiii.

CHAPTER VII.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION.

Recapitulation of principles. How best to further nature's plan in
the production of the largest amount of happiness. Pleasurable
sensibility has always increased with the increase in size of the ner-
vous system. We want to grow larger and more perfect brains.
Sexual selection. Hereditary descent. All the physical and men-
tal powers to be developed proportionally and exercised daily.
Each of the "Seven Ages" has its special enjoyments, which cannot
be postponed, and to which we can never return. The especial
cultivation of the Esthetic and a taste for good reading, a fortune
for our old age. God everything or nothing. The world created
anew every day, and we must be in harmony with the laws by
which it is effected. The "One and All" requires the resignation
of the Individual and Personal-of all that is selfish-to the Infinite
Whole. This is the new religion.

INDEX.

pp. 304-344

pp. 347-358

A MANUAL

OF

ANTHROPOLOGY,

ETC.

CHAPTER I.

IN THE BEGINNING.

Ir is very difficult to fix dates in Geology; before or after certain occurrences is all that can be spoken of confidently with respect to time.

If we admit, therefore, that life may have existed upon this earth from one hundred millions to five hundred millions of years, this latitude, great as it seems, is perhaps no greater than the present state of our knowledge requires ; and it is fortunate that a hundred million years, more or less, make very little difference to our comfort at present. Authority is rather in favour of the smaller estimate.

Our earth and planetary system, and indeed the whole Cosmos, are supposed to have existed originally as nebulous. matter that is, a sort of "fiery mist" like the tails of comets. Our system has gradually settled down into its present form, evolving in the process an enormous quantity of heat, so that our earth must at one time have been molten at the surface, with a fiery atmosphere like the sun, and probably being to its satellite the moon what the sun is

B

to us.

The moon may be a dead and used-up world— such as the earth is becoming, and may probably become, before it falls into the sun, towards which all planetary bodies are gravitating. The sun may then take a habitable form, and revolve as a great planet round some more distant centre, and it and other stars in our "Milky Way" may form Planetary Systems on a larger scale, or may, by the great heat consequent on the change of their present "mode of motion," be again melted into nebulous fiery mist, and begin life again, as our earth is supposed originally to have begun. The earth has been very gradually cooling down, and is still conjectured to be in a state of internal fluidity. According to Sir Charles Lyell, the heat increases as we leave the surface for the interior one degree for every 65 feet. This degree of heat would boil water at a depth of two miles, and melt iron at a distance of thirty-four miles. Mr. Hull, in a paper read before the Royal Society (Jan., 1870), stated that at Rose Bridge Colliery, near Wigan, the deepest mine in Britain, it appears that at a depth of 808 yards the temperature of the coal is 93 degrees. This gives an increase of temperature of one degree for every 55 feet, and will render the supply of coal, which geologists say exists in such large quantities beneath the new red sandstone, rather difficult to reach, until a considerable farther cooling of the earth has taken place. At the meeting of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Chemical Society (1871) it was however stated that salt-mines at nearly the same depth as the Monkwearmouth Colliery are at a much lower, in fact, a comfortable working temperature; and the conclusion drawn from this was that the heat is due to chemical action going on within the coal itself. As respects this internal fluidity a considerable influence may be expected to be exercised upon the peculiar "mode of motion" which we call heat by the great pressure upon it from, above.

GEOLOGY.

But whatever may be the present peculiar state of the earth's interior, it seems to have existed in a very unquiet and uncomfortable condition for a very considerable period, and great commotions have taken place on its surface. Mountains, much higher than any at present existing, have been raised, continents and islands everywhere have emerged to be again submerged; and to come as near home as possible, it is Sir Charles Lyell's opinion that at one stage of the glacial period the mountains of Wales were much higher than at present;—at another stage, 2,300 feet lower; at one stage of the same period Scotland was 2,000 feet below its present level, and other parts of Britain 1,300 feet; then Great Britain and Ireland consisted of a few groups of small islands formed by the mountains of Wales, Cumberland, the Scottish highlands, Munster and Connaught, and probably of a larger island formed by the portion of England south of the Severn and the Thames. Thus, through the combined influences of Catastrophism, Uniformitarianism, and Evolutionism, representing the three great schools of geological theory, the earth has settled down into the comparatively quiet state in which we now find it, atmospheric and aqueous agencies having given it the varied strata so familiar to us. The crust of the earth is supposed to be about 60 miles thick, which bears the same proportion as one inch to a globe eleven feet in diameter. We need not be surprised therefore if some still further upheaval and lowering of continents should take place, and in fact it is found that the Western Coast of South America is steadily rising, and in North Europe the lands are in some places rising and others falling. Much of Scotland, Scandinavia, and of the Baltic shores have greatly risen in these latter times, and Cosmos asserts that it has recently been demonstrated by a reference to authentic documents that Guernsey and Jersey have sunk more than fifteen yards during the last five centuries. At present two-thirds of the earth's surface are covered with salt

water.