| | |Ibsen | | | |Bjornson | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |America |Irving | | | |Emerson | | | |Longfellow | | | |Whittier | | | |Lowell | | | |Holmes | | | |Lincoln | | +--------------+---------------------+ | | Russia |Turgenieff | | | |Tolstoy | | +--------------+---------------------+ | | Hungary |Kossuth | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1900 | | | +------+--------------+---------------------+ [Illustration: MAKING OF THE EARTH AND THE COMING OF MAN] THE BEGINNING OF THE EARTH BY PROFESSOR SOLLAS The origin of our planet is a problem which has appealed to the intellect of thoughtful men from the most remote times, and the earliest recorded speculations concerning it--those of the Mosaic cosmogony--possess a peculiar interest, since they embody the views of the ancient Chaldeans, who were not only systematic observers of the heavens, but made practical use of their results. [Sidenote: Beginning of a Famous Theory] The Mosaic cosmogony is not unworthy of the great people among whom it took its rise; it recognises the fact that the earth had a history antecedent to the advent of man, and its account of the order of events in this history is not only remarkable as a feat of _a priori_ reasoning, but accords in some respects with the results achieved after much labour by modern science. It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that the reign of evolution began, and attempts were made to trace the history of a planetary system from its source in a primeval nebula on purely mechanical grounds. Swedenborg (1735) was the pioneer in this direction, then came Thomas Wright (1750) of Durham, whose work furnished inspiration to Emanuel Kant (1755), and led him to construct a consistent scheme of the Universe. The last of this group of cosmic philosophers is Laplace (1796), whose admirable description of the evolution of the solar system was arrived at independently, and without knowledge of the previous work of Kant.