Volume 1

Popular science / edited by Arthur Mee.

Date:
1912-1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Popular science / edited by Arthur Mee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE STORY OF THIS BOOK By ARTHUR MEE This book is the story of Man and the World ,, It tells the history of the earth and the life of man. It goes back, as clearly as the mind oj man can , to the days when the iron with which we build our ships poured down on the earth as red-hot rain; it describes, as plainly as the words of men can, the things that men are doing on the earth to-day; it looks forward, as hopef ully as the faith of man can, to the destiny that awaits the human race. It is the book of lime and Space and all things in them, em braced in twelve great divisions, which are here described. THE UNIVERSE The Making of Worlds Millions of worlds fly about in space, and we live on one of them. Millions of stars shine through the skies, and all the stars are suns. You who read are one of millions of living things on one of millions of flying worlds. What is behind them all—at the back of what we call Space, before the beginning of what we call Time ? This giant sun, with heat enough to give to every human being on the earth as much as he gives to the whole earth itself, yet small enough to be the least of all the suns there are—what is the mighty scheme in which his part is but a little thing? What are these other worlds to us, and we to them ? Are they alive ? Can they be dead? Are they before us, or behind us, in the unfolding of Creation? We talk of power; but what of the power which swings these worlds in space, some of them on fire, some of them so far away that the mind of man cannot conceive the distance, some of them with raging seas of red-hot iron, most of them bigger than our own world, which seems to overwhelm us, yet is like a grain of sand in the vastness of the universe! What was the beginning-? What is the end? o o GROUP 2 THE EARTH The Earth we Live on Out of the Everywhere came a million worlds ; out of a cloud of fire came the earth on which we live. Count less journeys the cloud of fire made through the heavens before the red-hot earth cooled down, shrank within itself, threw off the fragment that is now our moon, and became a mighty ball 8,000 miles from side to side and 25,000 miles round. So huge a thing to us that the mind cannot conceive it, this earth is but a speck among the worlds that whirl with it in space, and on this speck, this atom in a universe, roll the Atlantic Ocean and the great Pacific. Out of this speck rise all the powers that men control ; on this speck happened all that history has to tell. Prom inside