It has been truly said that the Lord hath some very strange customers among those who love Him, and indeed we shall find our planet inhabited by a weird and extraordinary variety of fellow-boarders. Many of them, upon first acquaintance, will appear to be possessed of very objectionable personal habits and of general characteristics which we would rather not encounter in our own children. But two billion human beings, even if they do not cut much of a figure when packed in a wooden box, are still a very respectable number of people, and amongst so many there is of course the widest possible scope for all sorts of experiments of an economic and social and cultural nature. It seems to me that those experiments deserve our attention before anything else. For a mountain is, after ail, merely a mountain until it has been seen by human eyes and has been trod by human feet and until its slopes and valleys have been occupied and fought over and cultivated by a dozen generations of hungry settlers.
THE HUMAN TOUCH
The Atlantic Ocean was just as wide and deep and as wet and salty before the beginning of the thirteenth century as after, but it took the human touch to make it what it is to-day—a bridge between the New World and the Old, the highway for the commerce between East and West.
For thousands of years the endless Russian plains lay ready to offer their abundant harvests to whomsoever should take the trouble to sow the first grain. But the aspect of that country today would be a very different one if the hand of a German or a Frank, rather than that of a Slav, had guided the iron-pointed stick that ploughed the first furrows.
The islands of Nippon would shake and quake just as incessantly whether they happened to be inhabited by Japanese or by the remnants of the now defunct Tasmanian race, but in the latter case they would hardly be able to feed 85,000,000 people, while the British Isles, if they had been overrun by Neapolitans or Berbers instead of having been conquered by restless fighters from northern Europe, would never have become the centre of an empire one hundred and fifty times as large as the mother-country and containing one-quarter of all the human beings now assembled on our planet.
Generally speaking, I have paid more attention to the purely ‘human’ side of geography than to the commercial problems which are held to be of such great importance in a day and age devoted to mass production.
But experience has taught me that no matter how eloquent you wax upon the subject of importing and exporting, and the output of coal mines and oil reservoirs and bank deposits, you will never be able to tell your reader something which he can remember from one page to the next. Whenever he has need of inch figures he will be obliged to look them up once more and verify them with the help of a dozen contradictory (and often self-contradictory) handbooks on commercial statistics.
Man comes first in this geography.
His physical environment and background come next.
The rest is given whatever space remains.
Chapter III
* * *
OUR PLANET: ITS HABITS, CUSTOMS, AND MANNERS
Let us begin with an old and trusted definition: “The world is a small, dark object, entirely surrounded by space.”
It is not a ‘sphere’ or a ball but a ‘spheroid,’ which is first cousin to a sphere, and consists of a ball slightly flattened at the poles. The so-called ‘poles’ you can find for yourself by sticking a knitting needle through the centre of an apple or an orange and holding the object straight in front of you. Where the knitting needle emerges from the apple or the orange, there the poles are situated, one in the middle of a deep sea (the North Pole) and the other on top of a high mountain plateau.
As for the ‘flatness’ of the polar regions, it need not disturb you in the least. For the axis of the earth from pole to pole is only 1/300 shorter than the diameter taken at the equator. In other words, if you were the proud possessor of a globe of three feet in diameter (and few globes that you can buy in the shops are as large as that—you would have to go to a museum to find one), the axis would be only 1/8 of an inch shorter than the equatorial diameter, and it would hardly show unless the workmanship had been of exceptional fineness.
Nevertheless the fact is of considerable interest to explorers who are trying to find their way through the polar regions and to those who make a study of the higher forms of geography. But for the purposes of the present book it is sufficient that I have mentioned it. Your physics master has probably one of those little contraptions in his laboratory that will show you how the poles could not help becoming flat as soon as our speck of dust began to revolve upon its own axis. Ask him to let you see it. That will save you a trip to the home of all the meridians.
The earth, as we all know, is a planet. We have inherited the word from the Greeks, who had observed or thought they had observed that certain stars were for ever moving across the skies while others apparently stood still. They therefore called the former ‘planets’ or ‘wanderers,’ and the latter ‘fixed stars,’ because, having no telescopes, they could not follow them on their peregrinations. As for the word ‘star,’ we do not know its origin, but it probably has something to do with a Sanskrit root, which was in turn connected with the verb ‘to strew.’ If that be true the stars would then be the little flames ‘strewn’ all over the heavens, a description which is quite pretty and fits the case admirably.
The earth spins round the sun and depends upon the sun for its light and heat. As the sun is more than seven hundred times as large as all the planets put together, and as the temperature of the sun near the surface is about 6000° Centigrade, the earth need not feel apologetic because she borrows her humble little portion of comfort from a neighbour who can so easily spare these few charitable rays.
In olden days people believed that the earth was situated in the centre of the universe, a small, flat disc of dry land entirely surrounded by the waters of the ocean and suspended in the air like the coffin of Mohammed. A few of the more enlightened Greek astronomers and mathematicians seem to have had a very definite suspicion that this theory must be wrong. After several centuries of very hard and very straight thinking they came to the conclusion that the earth was not flat, but round, and that it did not hang quietly suspended in the air and in the exact centre of the universe, but that it was flying through space at a considerable speed round a much larger object which was called the sun.
At the same time they suggested that those other shining little orbs which seemed to revolve around us against a common background of so-called ‘fixed stars’ were merely our fellow-planets, children of the same mother-sun and subject to the identical laws of behaviour which regulated our own daily conduct—such as getting up and going to bed at certain regular hours, and being obliged to follow a track which had been laid out for us at the day of our birth and from which we could not stray without running the risk of instant destruction.
During the last two hundred years of the Roman Empire the thinking part of the population had accepted this hypothesis as something so self-evident that it could no longer be considered a subject for debate. But when the Church became all-powerful, in the fifth century, it was no longer safe to harbour such ideas, least of all that one which proclaimed the earth to be round. We should not judge them too harshly. In the first place, the earliest converts to Christianity generally belonged to those classes of society that had been the least exposed to the current learning of the times. And, furthermore, they were firmly convinced that the end of the world was near at hand, when Christ would return to the former scene of His sufferings to separate the good from the evil. He would return in the midst of all His glory and for every one to behold. But, so they reasoned, and quite correctly from their own point of view, if this were to be the case (and they had no doubt upon the subject) then the world must be flat. For otherwise Christ would have to make His reappearance twice—once for the benefit of the people on the western hemisphere and once for the benefit of those on the other side of the world. Such a procedure, of course, would be absurd and undignified, and therefore entirely out of t
he question.
The Church, therefore, for almost a thousand years insisted upon teaching that the earth was a flat disc and that it was the centre of the universe. In learned circles, among the scientists of a few of the monasteries and among the astronomers of some of the rapidly growing cities, the old Greek conception of a round world, revolving around the sun, together with a number of other planets, was never quite discarded. Most of the men who held this to be true did not openly dare to talk about the subject, but kept their ideas strictly to themselves. For they knew that a public discussion would merely upset the peace and quiet of millions of their less intelligent fellow-citizens while it would do nothing to bring the solution of the problem any nearer.
Since then, the Church people too, with very few exceptions, have been forced to accept the notion that the planet on which we live must be a ball. By the end of the fifteenth century the evidence in favour of this ancient Greek theory had become too overwhelming to be refuted any longer. And it was and is based upon the following observations:
In the first place, there is the fact that when we approach a mountain or a ship at sea we first of all notice the summit or the top of the mast and only very gradually, as we come nearer, are we able to see the rest of the object under observation.
In the second place, when a partial eclipse of the moon takes place, the shadow of the earth on the moon is a circle, and only a ball will cause a circular shadow.
ONLY ROUND OBJECTS CAST ROUND SHADOWS
In the third place, the other planets and stars too are spheres, and why should ours alone among so many billions be an exemption?
And finally, when we travel northward towards the pole, the familiar constellations of the stars (the signs of the Zodiac of the ancients) disappear lower and lower below the horizon, but they arise again and come higher and higher the nearer we return to the equator.
I hope that I have brought forward enough indisputable facts to prove that the planet on which we happen to live must be round. But should the evidence be insufficient to satisfy you, go to any reliable professor of physics. He will take one of those stones that are for ever falling from high towers and he will let it do tricks with the law of gravity which prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the earth must be a sphere. If he uses very simple words and does not talk too fast you may be able to understand him, but only if you know a great deal more about mathematics and physics than I do.
ECLIPSE
Here I could indulge in a great many very learned statistics, which, however, would not be of the slightest use to you. The average mind (the author’s mind included) is simply not fit to follow such calculations with any degree of comfort. Take light for example. Light travels at the rate of speed of 186,000 miles per second. It goes seven times round the earth while you snap your fingers once. And yet the light from the nearest of the fixed stars (Alpha Centauri, if you want the correct address) must travel four and one-third years at the rate of 186,000 miles per second ere it strikes our eyes. The sun can reach us in eight minutes and Jupiter in three minutes, but the Pole Star, which plays such an important rôle in the science of navigation, would need four hundred and sixty-six years to send us a single ray of light.
Alas, most of us get slightly dizzy when we are asked to ‘imagine’ such a distance, and the very idea of a light-year, or the distance covered by a ray of light in a single year, or 365 × 24 × 60 × 60 × 186,000 miles, becomes something so enormous that as a rule we say, “Oh, yes,” and then go out and play with the cat or turn on the radio.
OUR SPEED THROUGH SPACE IS MUCH FASTER THAN THAT OF THE FASTEST CANNON-BALL
But we are all familiar with railway trains. Let us try it that way:
An ordinary passenger train, going day and night without stops, would need five-sevenths of a year to reach the moon. But it would need three hundred years to get to the sun. It would need 8,300 years to get to the suburbs where the planet Neptune lives. All that, however, would be mere child’s play compared to a trip to the nearest of the fixed stars, for that would mean a voyage of 75,000,000 years. As for the Pole Star, the train would need 700,000,000 years to get there, and 700,000,000 years is a long time, a very long time. If we put the duration of life for the average human being at about seventy years (which is a very sanguine estimate), 10,000,000 generations of human beings would have been born and would have died ere that train got to the star of the mariner.
THOSE FEW SPECKS—AND THAT IS ALL WE KNOW OF OUR UNIVERSE
SPACE
NEIGHBOURS
And now we are talking only about the visible part of the Universe. Our telescopes are a great deal better than the funny little contraptions with which the contemporaries of Galileo searched the sky, and incidentally made some of the most remarkable discoveries. Even so, they are still very imperfect, and until we improve our lenses a thousand-fold we shall not make much headway. Therefore, when we talk about the universe, what we really mean is “that small part of the universe which is visible and which has come under human observation, or under the observation of those sensitive photographic plates which are substituted nowadays for the human eye.” As to the rest of the universe, the still invisible part, alas, we know nothing about it. And what is worse, we dare not even guess.
Among all those millions of luminaries which are our more Immediate neighbours there are only two which influence our own existence in a very direct and noticeable fashion, and those two are the sun and the moon. The sun, because he provides Our planet with heat and light and helps to produce that strange aquatic phenomenon which we know as the ‘tides’; the moon, because she takes a larger part in influencing the behaviour of the Ocean, being so much nearer to the earth.
THE TIDES
The moon is really quite near to us. Therefore, although it is much smaller than the sun (if we represent the sun by our familiar out-sized globe of three feet diameter, the earth would be a green pea and the moon the mere point of a pin) the moon has a much stronger ‘pull’ on the surface of the earth than the sun.
If the earth consisted entirely of solid matter, that pull of the moon would hardly make itself felt. But almost three-fourths of the surface of the earth consists of water and that water follows the moon on its peregrination across the earth, just as iron filings spread out upon a sheet of paper will follow the toy magnet you pass over the table.
THE LAYERS OF ATMOSPHERE
All day and all night long a broad strip of water, several hundred miles wide, is following in the wake of the moon. When it enters bays and harbours and the mouths of rivers, and becomes greatly condensed, it causes the tides of twenty or thirty or forty feet difference which make navigation in those waters such a very difficult feat. When the sun and the moon happen to be on the same side of the earth, the pull is of course much stronger than when the moon is there alone, and then we get a so-called ‘spring-tide’; and a spring-tide in many parts of the world is something very much akin to a small inundation.
The earth is entirely surrounded by a layer of nitrogen and oxygen which we call the atmosphere or the ‘air.’ This layer is supposed to be about 300 miles thick, and it turns round together with the earth just as the skin of an orange turns round with the inside of the orange which it protects.
Recently a Swiss professor in a specially designed balloon went over ten miles up in the air, into that part of the atmosphere which had never been visited before. That was quite a feat, but 290 miles remain to be explored.
The atmosphere, together with the surface of the earth and I he sea, is the laboratory in which all our different sorts of weather, our winds and our rainstorms and blizzards and our dry periods, are manufactured. As these influence our happiness and well-being every hour of our lives we ought to discuss them here in considerable detail.
THEY KEEP US WARM LIKE SO MANY BLANKETS
The three factors which make our climate what it is (but rarely, alas, what it should be) are the temperature of the soil, the prevailing wind, and the amount of moi
sture which is present In the air. Originally ‘climate’ meant the ‘slope of the earth.’ For the Greeks had noticed that as the surface of the earth ‘sloped’ further and further towards the poles, both the temperature and the humidity of the spots they visited also changed, and thus ‘climate’ came to mean the atmospheric condition of any given region rather than its exact geographic position.
To-day, when we speak of the ‘climate’ of a country we mean the average weather conditions which prevail there during the different seasons of the year, and it is in that sense that I shall use the word.
First let me say something about those mysterious winds which have played such a great part in the civilization of mankind. For without the regular ‘trade-winds’ of the equatorial ocean the discovery of America might have been deferred until the age of the steamboat. Without the dew-laden breezes, California and the countries of the Mediterranean would never have reached that degree of prosperity which sets them apart from their neighbours in the north and in the east. Not to mention the particles of rock and sand which, swept forward by the wind, will act as gigantic, invisible sheets of sand-paper, and which after millions of years will grind even the most powerful mountain ranges from the face of the earth.
A wind is a current of air which flows from one place to another. But why does a current of air flow from one place to another? Because some of the air is usually warmer than the rest and therefore lighter, and has a tendency to rise as high as it can go. When that happens cooler air flows inward at lower levels to replace it.
The Home of Mankind Page 2
