If from the land evidence of drying up we turn to the marine, we see the same shrinkage at work. It has even been discovered in a lowering of the ocean bed, but as this may so easily be disputed, we turn to one aspect of the situation which cannot so easily be gainsaid,—the bodies of water that have been cut off. That the Dead Sea, the Caspian, the Great Salt Lake, are slowly but surely giving way to land, is patent. If the climate at least were not more arid than before this could not occur; but more than this, if the ocean were not on the whole shrinking, there would be no tendency to leave such arms of itself behind to shrivel up. That the ocean basins are deepening is possible, but we know of one depletion which is not replaced—evaporation into space; and of another bound to come—withdrawal into fissures when the earth shall cease to be too hot. This gradual withdrawal of the water may seem an unpleasant one to contemplate, but like most things it has its silver lining in the hope it holds out that sometime there shall be no more sea. Those of us who detest the constant going down to the sea in ships hardly more than the occasional going down with them, can take a crumb of comfort in the thought. Unfortunately it partakes of a somewhat far-off realization in our distant descendants, coming a little too late to be of material advantage to ourselves. But let me not leave the reader wholly disconsolate. For another thought we can take with us in closing our sketch of so much of the Earth’s life as brings it well down to to-day,—the thought that it has grown for us a steadily better place to contemplate from the earliest eras to the present time. Indeed, with innate prescience we forbore to appear till the prospect did prove pleasing. Finally, we may palliate prognostication by considering that if its future seem a thought less attractive, we, at least, shall not be there to see. CHAPTER VIII DEATH OF A WORLD Everything around us on this Earth we see is subject to one inevitable cycle of birth, growth, decay. Nothing that begins but comes at last to end. Not less is this true of the Earth as a whole and of each of its sister planets. Though our own lives are too brief even to mark the slow nearing to that eventual goal, the past history of the Earth written in its rocks and the present aspects of the several planets that circle similarly round the Sun alike assure us of the course of aging as certainly as if time, with all it brings about, passed in one long procession before our very eyes.