PRIMITIVE MAN'S IDEA OF THE UNIVERSE.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXVI, Issue 10060, 30 January 1909, Page 4 (Supplement)

PRIMITIVE MAN'S IDEA OF THE UNIVERSE.

The early speculations about the form of the universe and the 'position of the earth in it form a most interesting phase of the evolution of scientific thought. In these speculations we find the germs of modern astronomy, physics, and chemistry, and they are therefore worth serious study. A brief discussion of these primitive ideas is contained in an article contributed to the "Revue Scientifique" by ■Jules Sageret. (Says this writer: "We may reconstruct, in imagination, the earth as primitive man conceived it, if we are able to divest our minds of all acquired notions. The earth is a plain of indefinite extent, on which, rests an immense solid dome, the sky. Ihe sun, the moon, and the stars follow the course of this dome and bury themselves in the ground whence they have emerged at a point opposite to that of their disappearance. This evidently indicates the existence of openings communicating with a subterranean world lighted by the sun during the night and 1 by the stars _ m our day. This imaginative restoration conforms t-o the beliefs of certain savage peoples. . . .It is fortunate for the progress of science that this cosmology _ was not adopted by everyone, not that it is absurd, but, on the contrary, because it is so reasonable that it might have sufficed humanity for a long time. . . . We might then have still been awaiting a Columbus. Local or other reasons caused different cosmologies to be imagined, ui -eneral the idea of a flat earth was retained. Many people believed that the abode of man was surrounded with water. They knew of the great seas beyond which no land had been found, and; were thus led 1 to believe that these were tlie_ limits of the world. How, then, explain the course of the stars? Doubtless the stars were not like terrestrial fires; their di■yine nature enabled them to resist the trials that would have eternally extinguished the latter. Nevertheless, thanks to the powerful impulse of analogy, it was often preferred to spare the sun, which is hot, a nightly bath in the cold, ocean waves. Several methods were devised to , this effect. In the Indies, at the Vedic and Brahmanic epoch, the sun was supposed to be a disc with two faces,- one obscure, the other luminous; it showed the latter in. it 6 journey from east 10 west, and the former on its return course.' Or, more simply still, the writer- goes on to say, the light of the sun was sometimes believed to extend only to a certain distance. ,The Chinese even calculated the value of the radius of the constant circle of illumination, beyond which it was always night. Dwellers far inland, who knew not the sea, were inclined to use mountains in their cosmogonies. Hindus near the Himalayas thus believed the sun i to circle about Merou, the golden mountain, whose shadow caused night. This mountain was finally located at the North Pole. The Chaldean cosmology was also of the mountain type; 1 only the mountain in this case was final- ' lv identified with the whole earth. On the other hand, the Egyptians believed in ' an ultraterrestrial Nile, along which the Sun-god sailed in his barque. It was thus j the mountain cosmologies that came nearer to the truth. Thales, however, the first of the Greek philosophers who really desired to get at the reality of things, built his system on . that of the Egyptians rather than on the more rational plan of 1

the Chaldeans. By this time, the Egyption cosmology had become somewhat ' modified, however. "The Egyptians, who had at first a solid; sky, supported by four mountains, did away with it, little bv little. The celestial Nile grew until it became a sea, continuous to the ocean, on which the earth floated. By analogy with the sun, the moon was carried by a barque along this sea, and the same was imagined first of the planets and finally of all the stars. Aided by the conception of Nou, the primordial water, the universe became an indefinite watery mass in the bosom of which rested an immense hemi- > spheric air-bubble. On the lower part ot this bubble the earth floated. Such was the cosmology that '1 uales doubtless adopted, in great part. . . . The curiosity <"> l the lonian philosophers, more easy to demonstrate than to explain, founded a science to which our own is joined with a continuous bond. This curiosity, however, would have remained ineffective, :f it had not possessed, as a working-ba6is, the various previous cosmologies, which could be used for discussion and comparison.