SECRETS OF EARTH AND SEA
SECRETS OF EARTH AND SEA
BY
Sir RAY LANKESTER
K.C.B., F.R.S.
WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920
THE present volume is, like its predecessors, "Sciencefrom an Easy Chair" (Series I and Series II) and"Diversions of a Naturalist"—mainly a revision andreprint—with considerable additions—of articles publishedin daily or weekly journals. The first chapter appearedoriginally in "The Field." The Chapters VI, XX, XXI,and XXII were published in the "Illustrated LondonNews," under the title "About a Number of Things." Therest are some of the articles which, as "Science from anEasy Chair," I contributed, during seven years, to the"Daily Telegraph." That, to me very happy, conjunctionwas, like so many other happy things, necessarily interruptedby the Great War.
One result of that terrible cataclysm is that not a fewthoughtful writers have been led to deny the existence ofwhat they call "Progress," meaning by that word thedevelopment of mankind from a less to a more completeattainment of moral and physical well-being. Thequestion raised is obscured by the arbitrary use of theword "progress," since by it any movement from pointto point—whether advantageous and desirable or thereverse—is described, as, for instance, in the familiar titlesgiven by Bunyan to his book "The Pilgrim's Progress"and by Hogarth to his pictures "The Rake's Progress."[Pg vi]Those who to-day despair of man's future limit theiroutlook on the past to the conventional history of somethree or four thousand years. The only solid groundupon which we can base the supposition that mankindhas moved from a less to a more complete attainmentof moral and physical well-being and will continue todo so, exists in the ascertained facts of the past historyof living things on this Earth, and of man since hisearliest emergence from among the man-like apes madeknown to us by his stone-implements and fossilizedbones. That there has been a development from lower,simpler structure to higher, more complex, more efficientstructure is demonstrable, and so is the proposition thatthere has been in the human race a continuous developmentin the direction of increased adaptation to theconditions of social life and an increased control by manof those natural agencies which he can either favour whenconducive to his prosperity, or on the other hand canarrest when inimical to it. "The continuous weakening ofselfishness and the continuous strengthening of sympathy"(to adopt the words of the American philosopher,Fiske) are, in spite of numerous lapses and outbursts ofsavagery, patent features of the long history of mankind.We have no reason to doubt their continuation, whilstat the same time we must be prepared for and accept,without desponding, the ups and the downs, the disastersas well as the triumphs, which inevitably characterize thenatural process of evolution. One thing, above all others,we as conscious, reasoning beings can do which musttend to the further development and security of humanwell-being: we can ascertain ever more and more of thetruth, or in other words, "that which is." We can discover