Forlong - Rivers of Life

26
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
works always on fixed plans. What means it, then, if ordinary theologies be true, that
a cycle of the zodiac requires 25,810 years?—that is, this enormous time to complete
one of its revolutions?—that a cycle of oscillation of the angle of the ecliptic requires,
says La Place and Herschel, 20,250 years for completion?—that the cycle of eccentricity
of the little orb we inhabit round its central, or rather non-central sun, requires for its
completion possibly half a million of years, or accurately 515,610 years?—that a polar
cycle or the precession of the ecliptic, from equator to pole, which alone explains our
palms and mammoths under present eternal snows, may take 2,700,000 years to complete:
that though light travel at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, there are stars
whose light must have left them 6000 years before it reached us; that the time required
for the orbits of comets, whose supposed erratic approach our astronomers will tell us
to within a fraction of a second of time, varies from about 14,000 years to nearly
123,000 years?—and lastly, what means this, that we, revolving in our own orbit at
the rate of 68,000 miles per hour, or 600 millions of miles in one year, are also swung
along towards some mysterious point in illimitable space at the awful speed of
150,000,000 of miles per annum? These are figures which we can calculate and write
down, but which the mind of man is quite incapable of grasping. We and ours, aye
our paltry planet, with its 8000 miles diameter, sink here into utter insignificance, and
so surely do all its theologies, which have ever hitherto spoken of the phenomena
of the mighty framer of these mysterious worlds and their ways.
Without wandering away from our own little crust, we can, by some study, read
off millions of years from its latest fossils to its lifeless ages, by marking those of frozen
and tropical zones, and calculating the possible times which each growth required for
its rise and fall. From the glacial epoch, at the close of the tertiary period, to the
fossils of the carboniferous epoch, now buried in an arctic zone, requires, we are told,
nine ecliptic rotations, or 24,300,000 years, and Sir Charles Lyell says 240 millions of
years are required for the Cambrian formations. We would like to know what ages he
would assign for the upheaval of the great Indian continent or lower Himalayas, which
in the Miocene formations of the Sivalik ranges lying at their base, have disclosed to
us huge extinct animals, amongst which is a strange four horned deer (the Siratherium)
and a tortoise some eighteen feet long and seven feet high, with others, as giraffes and
the ostrich, denoting vast plains instead of the rugged mountains which now cover all
these parts. When were these lofty mountains a sea-bed which nourished the nummulites,
testaces, and other salt water creatures, now forming their earths and lime
rocks, and how long did it take to cover such lofty up-heavals with their now so prolific
vegetable and animal life? Sir Charles would no doubt answer us, as he long since
did similar questions, that “we require, when speaking of geological epochs, ‘to get
the poverty out of our bones’ before we can take into consideration the eons of time
that are required during which primeval people and language existed, and since which
dispersion and segregation have been going on.”