> The Childrens Encyclopedia, страница 1 > Out of the flame and fire came the Very things life wanted

Out of the flame and fire came the Very things life wanted

At first this big ball of ours was simply a globe of flaming gases and molten metals. As it cooled it formed a solid metallic crust, and as the metal cooled and solidified and condensed, it squeezed out slag as cooling iron in an iron foundry does. This slag formed the early crust of the Earth. And the amazing thing was that the crust contained iron and lime and sulphur and sodium and potassium—just those elements which were necessary to life.

More amazing still, when the cooling crust cracked, and when giant volcanoes spouted all over the world, out of the bowels of the Earth came steam which condensed into water and carbon dioxide gas, and so the Earth got rivers and seas and an atmosphere. After millions and millions of years of flame and fire, of see thing and boiling and bubbling, there came out of this fragment of the Sun exactly the right things to make life. The water, lifted and tossed by the air, broke down the crust into soil and mud—into the clay of life. ..

All that is amazing and wonderful, but all would have been in vain if the Sun had not been shining across space nearly a hundred million miles away. When the Sun broke up into bits, and the bits went flying as fiery planets round it, it might have seemed an unfortunate accident; but if the Sun had not flung forth the planets there would probably be no living things in the Solar System today. As it is often best for children to leave their parents and live their own separate lives, so it was best for the Earth to be parted from the Sun and go its own way. But the Earth still revolved round the Sun, and the rays of sunlight still reached the Earth, and it was these rays of sunlight that made living things, even as today they make food for us all.

How living things were manufactured from the materials ready in the Earth’s crust and in its atmosphere, nobody knows, but it probably came about in this way. On the Earth was the wonderful fluid water, with many substances dissolved in it, and the wonderful gas carbon dioxide which we can see bubbling in a soda water syphon any day. On the gas dissolved in the water the Sun shone down, and it has been proved that when the Sun shines on such a solution some of the rays from the poison called formaldehyde join with other rays to form starch out of the poison; and starch is perhaps the most important substance in the world in relation to life. It contains some of the energy of the sunlight which made it, and this energy comes forth when oxygen is joined to it. When we burn starch, for instance, we get the Sun’s energy out of it in the form of light and heat. We know, too, that all the energy of living depends on starch food. The Sun makes starch out of water and carbon dioxide in green plants, animals eat the starch, and climbing up a mil. all life depends on the energy of the Sun contained in that compound; all the tissues of living bodies are built out of it by the processes of digestion.

Now many people believe that Life itself originated in some such, way—first the poison that in itself is destructive to life, then starch, then from this starch the energetic substance of life called protoplasm. That may or may not be so; but it is certain that today all living things depend on the energy of the Sun in starch and that without sunlight life could not be. In many ways this arrangement of a Sun to put energy into the gas and water of the Earth would seem to be the contrivance of a foreseeing Mind, and it is really a much more complicated arrange m en t than it looks; for the Sun’s rays would not only make starch but would slay all living things were it not that the atmosphere holds back most of the rays. Exactly the right rays are let through to make starch without destroying life.

In some such way Life began, and the conditions on the planet were such that it multiplied and developed till now Earth, air, and sea swarm with myriads of living creatures. Is it not strange to think that all these things came out of a cloud of hydrogen and helium gasе

Not only in starch do we enjoy the energy of the Sun that was stored up in the starch of green plants for hundreds of thousands of years. Who could have imagined that all the decaying vegetation in ancient swamps and jungles would one day drive the machinery of unborn men е Yet life as it is today would be quite impossible if our wonderful little planet had not hoarded this energy for us. With two arms and hands a man can do a good deal, but the writer is sitting at a mahogany table brought ’from a tropical forest, writing with a steel pen by electric light. He could not have the table, nor the pen, nor the light, except for the energy of coal. A civilised man′ requires and possesses for his needs not only the energy of two arms but the energy of twenty, and′eighteen of these are the black arms of coal.