ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The Author desires to express his thanks to Dr. William K. Gregory, of the American Museum of Natural History, as well as to the other Museum authorities, for their courtesy and assistance in the matter of illustrations, and in the preparation of the text. The book does not pretend, of course, to be a strictly scientific work. Many liberties have been taken, in order to render the subject interesting to the youthful mind. Man's early inventions did not come about so simply as is pictured in the various chapters. But the development of civilisation is a romance, and only by so treating it can we hope to enlist the interest of the young reader. It is sufficient that the story rests upon a foundation of fact.

PREFACE FOR PARENTS

Every child, between the ages of five and fifteen, seeks by constant questioning to grasp the fundamental facts upon which our whole fabric of present-day knowledge is based. These facts, painfully gathered by the human race during its many centuries of development, must of necessity be absorbed by the child within the short space of some ten or twelve years. It is a prodigious task, and one in which the growing mind should be afforded every possible assistance. Two courses are usually adopted by parents; one, to dismiss the child's questions with the stock phrase, "You are not old enough to understand," the other, to place in his hands some so-called book of knowledge, containing, it is true, a great mass of information which the child should possess, but usually so badly presented, so jumbled together, that no one fact has any bearing on another, and thus the child is left to turn from "Why the ocean is salt?" to "What is a lightning rod?" without the least understanding of the principles and laws which underly these and all other facts, and link them together in a composite whole.

The writer has followed, with his own children, a method of presenting the steps in the gradual development of man which has produced most gratifying results. Instead of treating each fact, each laboriously accumulated bit of human knowledge, as a mere isolated patch in a crazy-quilt of information, he has attempted to arrange them in logical sequence, to form an interesting pattern, so that as the child's fund of knowledge increases, he feels a deeper and deeper interest in fitting each newly acquired fact into its proper place in his mental picture of things.

The result is that the child is constantly building a structure which he understands. His mass of accumulated knowledge is not heaped together hap-hazard, like a pile of blocks, but each occupies its proper and logical place in a slowly developing whole. He derives pleasure from what would otherwise be hard work, just as he would derive pleasure from fitting together the pieces of a puzzle picture; he finds himself progressing toward some understandable end, and without knowing it, he has not only gathered his facts, and catalogued them, but he has begun to think about them, and their relation to each other, in short, he has begun the process of logical thought, which is the first and greatest step in all education.

In this process of storing away in his brain the accumulated knowledge of the ages, the child's mind passes, with inconceivable rapidity, along the same route that the composite minds of his ancestors travelled, during their centuries of development. The impulse that causes him to want to hunt, to fish, to build brush huts, to camp out in the woods, to use his hands as well as his brain, is an inheritance from the past, when his primitive ancestors did these things. He should be helped to trace the route they followed with intelligence and understanding, he should be encouraged to know the woods and all the great world of out of doors, to make and use the primitive weapons, utensils, toys, his ancestors made and used, to come into closer contact with the fundamental laws of nature, and thus to lay a groundwork for wholesome and practical thinking which cannot be gained in the classroom, or the city streets.

As has been said, the writer has tested the methods outlined above. The chapters in "The Earth's Story" are merely the things he has told his own children. It is of interest to note that one of these, a boy of seven, on first going to school, easily outstripped in a single month a dozen or more children who had been at school almost a year, and was able to enter a grade a full year ahead of them. The child in question is not in the least precocious, but having understood the knowledge he has gained, he is able to make use of it, he has a definite mental perspective, a sure grasp on things, which makes study of any kind easy for him, and progression correspondingly rapid.

Too much emphasis cannot be laid upon the fact that methods of thinking are more important, than the particular things we think about. Right thinking is the cornerstone of all mental development. In the writer's opinion it is the great lack in modern education.

Frederic Arnold Kummer.

Catonsville, Maryland.

CHAPTER I
HOW MOTHER NATURE MADE THE EARTH READY FOR MAN

In the beginning, millions of years ago, before there were any men, or animals, or trees, or flowers, the Earth was just a great round ball of fire, bright and dazzling, like the Sun.

Instead of being solid, as it is now, it was a huge cloud of white-hot gases, whirling through space.

We all know how solids can be turned into liquids, and liquids into gases, by Heat, for we have only to heat a solid piece of ice to turn it into a liquid, water, and if we keep on heating the water, it will turn into a gas, which we call steam. It was the same way with all the solid things on the Earth; Heat had turned them all to gases, like steam.

Then God called Mother Nature to Him and told her to get the Earth ready for Man to live on.

So Mother Nature sent Heat away to melt up some other worlds, and called for his brother, Cold. And Cold came rushing up, his great white wings glittering with frost.

"What can I do for you, Mother Nature?" he asked.

"Blow on the Earth with all your might, Cold," said Mother Nature, "and get it ready for Man to live on." Then she flew away, and as she went she took a piece of the Earth-cloud and rolled it into a ball, and set it spinning in space about the Earth, so that it might cool down later and be the Moon.

When Mother Nature had gone, Cold, who was the spirit of the great outer darkness in which the Sun and Stars move, hovered about the Earth and blew on it with all his might, and as his icy breath swept over the fiery Earth, the hot gases began to get cooler and cooler, and at last they turned back to liquids again. And after that, they got cooler still and began to turn to solids, just as hot melted taffy gets hard and solid when it cools.

It took Cold a very long time to cool the Earth, millions of years, but he did not mind, for he had nothing else to do. So he blew and blew, and after a while a hard solid crust began to form all over the Earth, very rough and uneven, with high hills and mountains sticking up here and there, and between them great wide valleys and plains, all of solid rock.

When Mother Nature came back to look at the Earth, Cold asked her how she liked it.

"You have done very well, Cold," she said, "but it isn't fit for Man to live on yet, for it is too hot, and there isn't any water. Blow some more, and make Rain."

So Cold blew again, on the great white clouds of steam that came rolling up from the hot Earth, and his icy breath cooled the steam and turned it into Rain, just as the steam from a teakettle will turn to little drops of water if you cool it suddenly. And the Rain fell back on the Earth, year after year, until at last it filled up the great wide plains and valleys between the hills and turned them into rivers, and lakes and oceans. But they were boiling hot.

"How do you like it now, Mother Nature?" asked Cold.

"It still isn't fit for anything to live on," said Mother Nature. "You must cool it some more. And tell Rain to make some earth for things to grow in. They can't grow in solid rock."

So Cold blew again, harder than ever, and as the cool Rain fell he said:

"Rain, will you please make some earth for things to grow in?"

"Very well," said Rain. "I will."

So Rain fell for days and months and years on the hot rocks, and cracked and softened them, and each little raindrop as it rushed down the sides of the mountains, carried a bit of soft, crumbling rock down into the valleys, and after a very long time, all these bits of rock-dust which Rain had washed down from the hills formed great wide beds of mud covering the rocky surface of the plains many feet deep.

At the same time that Rain was washing the soft rock down into the valleys to form mud, he also carried down many bits of harder rock, yellow and white, and other colours, like glass. These rocks would not form mud, because they were too hard, but instead they became smooth round pebbles of all sizes, with millions of tiny bits, called sand, and the rivers carried them down to the ocean, and made beautiful clean beaches, as you can see whenever you go to the seashore. And Rain washed many other things out of the rocks and carried them down into the ocean, such as salt. There are great beds of rock-salt all over the Earth, and Rain melted them, and washed the salt into the ocean, and that is why the ocean is salt.

When Mother Nature, who was very busy, came to look at the Earth she smiled, because it pleased her.

"You have done very well, Cold and Rain," she said. "All the rivers and lakes and oceans are full of nice warm water, and all the valleys and plains are covered with soft warm mud, ready for things to grow in. I think I had better speak to the Sun."

So Mother Nature said to the Sun:

"Sun, the Earth is ready for you now. Please make something grow." Then she went away to look after some other worlds she was fixing up.

The Sun looked down at the Earth and smiled as he saw the nice rich beds of mud, and the great wide Ocean.

"Are you ready, Ocean?" he asked.

"Yes," said the Ocean. "I am warm and salt and full of Rain."

"Good. We shall need plenty of Rain," said the Sun. Then he turned to the Air.

"Are you moist and warm, Air?" he asked. "Yes," said the Air. "I am very moist and warm."

"Good," said the Sun. Then he turned to the beds of mud.

"Mud," he said, "you are ugly and black, but you are also full of nice rich chemicals and all sorts of substances we need to make things grow. With the help of Air, and Rain, I am going to cover you with a beautiful carpet of green, so that you will not be ugly any longer."

So the Sun turned his blazing rays on the soft mud and warmed it, and then a wonderful thing happened. Tiny living things, like plants, formed out of the chemicals in the Mud and the Water, and the Air, began to spring up, just as God had long ago planned. They were very small and weak at first, but after a while they grew stronger and stronger, until they had spread all over the Earth, wherever there was mud or dirt for them to grow in. And later on, because the Air was so moist and warm, the way it is in the tropics, and because the Sun was so hot, and there was plenty of Rain, the plants on the Earth grew to be very large and strong. There were ferns, like the little ones we see in flower-pots, as big as trees, and all sorts of tall, rank grasses, and vines, even at the North and South Poles, for in those days, before the Earth had cooled down the way it has now, the Poles were warm, too.

For hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years these great ferns and other plants grew, and died, and fell back into the mud, and as they rotted they made more earth, for other plants to grow in, so that the earth-covering on top of the rocks grew thicker and thicker. In some places the leaves and trunks of these fern-trees got mashed down on each other in thick layers, and became harder and harder, until they turned to coal. Often, in coal mines, the miners will break open a lump of coal and find printed in its surface the exact pattern of the leaf of one of these great fern-trees, just as it fell, millions of years ago.

While all this was going on, Mother Nature, having a little time to spare, came back to take a look at the Earth. It was one of the smallest worlds she had to look after, so she could not give it all her time.

"It is doing very nicely indeed," she said to the Sun. "In eight or ten million years it may be ready for Man. But we must have some fish and other things first. Won't you please attend to it for me, Sun? I am very busy just now looking after some new-born stars in the Milky Way."

"Certainly," said the Sun. "I will attend to it at once." So he turned to the Ocean.

"Ocean," he said, "wouldn't you like to have some fish swimming about in you?"

"Indeed I should," said the Ocean. "I am very big, and I have plenty of room for all the fish you can make."

"Good," said the Sun. "Do you see those tiny spongy growths along the edge of the mud – those funny little things like jelly-fish. I have noticed that some of them haven't quite made up their minds yet whether to be plants, or fish. They have begun to wriggle and squirm about in the mud, and a plant, you know, is supposed to take root and stay in one place. Don't you think we ought to help them to make up their minds?"

"Yes," said the Ocean. "What do you want me to do?"

"Well, suppose you gently wash them loose from the shore, and let them drift for a while in your nice warm salt water. Maybe they will get to like it."

"I'll try it," said the Ocean.

So he did, and after a time the tiny creatures got to like the water so much that they lived in it all the time, instead of just squirming about in the mud. And as thousands of years went by, some of them grew little shell-houses to live in, and some of them fastened themselves to rocks, like oysters, and waited for food to drift right into their mouths, but others grew fins and tails, so that they could swim about in search of something to eat. It took a very long time of course, but after a while, as they grew and grew, and changed and changed, the Ocean came to be full of all sorts of fish, large and small. And the Ocean was very proud of them.