CHAPTER NINE
DID LIFE FIRST COME TO THIS EARTH IN A METEOR?
Among the most startling suggestions recently thrown out by men of science, not one, perhaps, has seemed more amazing to the general public than the idea put forward by Sir William Thomson in the able address with which he inaugurated the meeting of the British Association (1871)—that life on the earth may have had its origin from seeds borne to our planet by meteors, the remnants of former worlds.
—R. A. PROCTOR.
The quaint suggestion thus advanced by Lord Kelvin regarding the possibility of the first germs of life reaching our planet in the form of “a fragment of an exploded world,” was taken seriously at the time by some, but was undoubtedly merely a jest on the part of the able speaker. As my father remarked in the book from which the above quotation is made (_The Orbs Around Us_): “I can scarcely bring myself to believe that the eminent professor was serious in urging his hypothesis of seed-bearing meteors. Englishmen speak sometimes of the slowness with which a Scotsman apprehends a jest; but the Scotsman may return the compliment, so far, at least, as the southern estimate of Scottish humor is concerned. For a true Scot makes his jest with a gravity and _aplomb_ unequaled among Sassenach humorists. It is far from improbable that the seriousness with which the seed-bearing meteorites have been discussed proved infinitely amusing to the gathering of the clans in Edinburgh.”
Nevertheless, that there were some believers who were convinced that Lord Kelvin would not have advanced such a theory without some solid basis for its foundation, was shown by the fact that the great Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, considered it worth while, in his book entitled _The Life of the Universe_, to refer to the various difficulties which have made it next to impossible to establish the theory, which he compares (from the standpoint of arousing popular interest) with the problem of perpetual motion. He concluded his remarks on the subject by the statement (which has already been confirmed) that the problem of spontaneous generation in the actual form of a meteor will, “it is to be expected, be eliminated from the scientific program, just as the problem of perpetual motion has been discarded.”
Nevertheless, there is something fascinating about this myth which appealed strongly, at the time it was advanced, to the imagination, though it led to queries which when answered led nowhere. If the worlds by bursting supplied space with seed-bearing meteors, how were they themselves peopled with living beings? “This circumstance of itself throws an air of doubt over the new hypothesis,” according to my father’s views on the subject, “as a seriously intended account of the origin of life on our earth.”
It recalls the cumbersome way in which the Hindu accounted for the support of our planet in space, supposing it rested upon the back of a tortoise, but the Hindu student of science might well ask how is the tortoise itself supported? Or again, supposing life-bearing meteorites reached our planet from exploded worlds, what would be their condition by the time they were deposited on a soil favorable for their development?
According to Flammarion regarding the possibility of meteoric fragments coming to our planet from an ancient satellite of the earth which was shattered to pieces, the germs shut up in the interior of the meteorite would remain in a kind of lethargic sleep without losing any of their germinative qualities during their plunge through interplanetary space. In fact, the author lends a seductive air of plausibility to the myth, suggesting that the fragments would reach our planet fresh and cold, to be again rejuvenated and come to life, but even Flammarion is compelled to acknowledge that we have found nothing to prove such a theory true. But if this new theory should be accepted, as my father wrote in 1871, “we have reason to regard with apprehension the too close approach of one of these visitants; because, if one meteor supplied the seeds of the living things now existing on the world, another may supply myriads of seeds of undesirable living things; and perhaps the sequent struggle for life may result in the survival of the fittest.”
It may seem superfluous to add that, in a collision by which a world was shivered into fragments, the seeds of life would have what may be described as a warm time, since the collision could hardly fail to vaporize the destroyed world. The fiery heat generated by the collision, followed by a voyage during myriads of millions of ages through the inconceivable cold of space, and the effect of the fierce heat which accompanies the fall of meteoric masses upon our earth, would seem so unfavorable to the germs of life that we may accept with confidence the belief that all such germs had been completely destroyed before reaching this planet.
Arrhenius reversing the seed-bearing-meteor theory in connection with a meteorite bringing the seeds of life to our planet, makes a neat calculation showing the time which would be required for a tiny particle, drawn from our planet and hurled into space, to arrive at the surface of a planet circling around the star Alpha in the constellation of the Centaur. It would be twenty days on its way to Mars (traveling at the usual rate of speed assigned to meteors, _viz._, some twenty-six miles a second.) A year would elapse before it reached the outermost planet Neptune, which travels on the confines of the solar system, and some nine thousand years ere it plunged through the atmosphere surrounding a planet circling round the nearest star, and finally crashed on its surface. Endless are the speculations which might thus be indulged in regarding the celestial voyages of meteors through interplanetary space, but though the misguided ones which have rashly ventured too near our planet have been trapped in its atmosphere, landing on its surface before suffering complete annihilation, have been weighed, measured, and tested by chemical analysis, the past history of their excursions into space is enshrouded in a mysterious silence as unbroken as that of the Sphinx.[14]
[Illustration:
OUTH LODGE, KEITHICK, WHERE THE STRATHMORE METEORITE FELL THROUGH THE ROOF, DECEMBER 3, 1917
Photograph of the lodge and Mr. and Mrs. Hill taken by H. Coates ]
The writer at one time had a paper weight to which she attached great value, despite the fact that it was an apparently insignificant metallic stone weighing a few ounces, but there was a fascination in the conjecture as to where it had come from. That was the query which could never be answered, for all that was actually known of the past history of this celestial visitor dated from one eventful evening when it was seen for a few brief seconds as a momentary streak of light, revealing the course of its descent, so that a fortunate mortal here below was enabled to locate it after its swift plunge to earth. After it had cooled sufficiently to bear handling, it was carefully examined and its substance was found to be thickly interspersed with carbon particles, revealing, like so many telltale imps, that this inert mass had once known better days when its life was filled with activity until it took the fatal plunge which ended so disastrously. “If you only knew what I have seen, and where I have been during my wanderings in space,” one could imagine the meteorite saying in reply to the numerous queries, regarding its origin, in the mind of the writer; until this fascinating little visitor in space vanished as mysteriously as it had come, through too great a confidence placed in an audience in the Far West, where the meteorite was passed round for inspection and never returned.
However, the writer was enabled to resume her study of the subject on a larger scale while visiting the famous Foyer collection of meteorites at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, where the specimens are a little too hefty for transportation. No one, for instance, would be able to depart with the Ahnighito, the great Cape York meteorite, which was found on the north coast of Melville Bay near Cape York, Greenland, by Commander Robert E. Peary, in 1894, without attracting a considerable amount of attention. It is the largest and heaviest meteorite known, weighing over thirty-six tons. It possibly weighed more up to the date of its fall, as the guide Tallakoteah, who enabled Peary to discover the meteorite, informed him that up to the early part of the nineteenth century, members of the Eskimo tribe had found it very useful in providing them with material for knives and hatchets.
[Illustration:
STRATHMORE METEORITE, ESSENDY FRAGMENT
Photograph taken December 3, 1917, by H. Coates ]
There are really three masses, the largest already referred to being ten feet eleven inches long, six feet nine inches high, and five feet two inches thick. It was called Ahnighito after the name of the daughter of the explorer. The next larger mass weighing about three tons was named “The Woman,” because the shape suggested the idea of a woman seated on the ground with a babe in her arms and a shawl around her shoulders. The third and smallest mass weighing about 1,000 pounds, was called “The Dog,” and the three meteorites were known as a group to the Eskimo under the name of “Saviksue,” or “The Great Irons.”
The Woman and The Dog were visited by Peary in 1894, and were obtained the following year after much difficulty and exciting work, an incident of which was the breaking up of the cake of ice on which The Woman had been ferried from the shore to the ship, just as the mass was about to be hoisted aboard. Fortunately there was enough tackle around the meteorite to prevent its loss. In 1895 Commander Peary visited Ahnighito, which lay on an island only four miles from the two smaller masses, but he could do little toward its removal. The next year he made another voyage for the purpose of getting the Great Iron, but was again unsuccessful. This third attempt was made in 1897, when the meteorite was brought in safety to New York in the ship _Hope_.
In the Foyer collection is also the famous Willamette meteorite, which weighs more than fifteen tons. Its height is over six feet, its width four feet, and its length ten feet. It is one of the most interesting meteoric fragments in the collection, though not the largest. Nevertheless, its appearance tells a wondrous story of the experience it must have had during its swift rush through the air. The deep hollows in its surface were probably caused by friction with the particles encountered during its swift flight through the atmosphere surrounding our planet. This resulted in the melting of part of the metallic substance of which it is composed, chemical analysis showing that it contains an admixture of iron, nickel, a small amount of cobalt, and in addition some phosphorus and sulphur. To give an idea of the depth of the hollows, the curator of the Museum showed the writer a photograph of two boys seated in two of the largest.
The Willamette was discovered in the autumn of 1902, in the forest about nineteen miles south of Portland, by a Welsh miner named Ellis Hughes. At first he thought he had discovered an iron mine, but on digging away the earth surrounding it, he found that it was a meteorite.
The miner, who was well acquainted with the handling of such masses, constructed a low wooden truck, on to which he managed to overturn the fifteen-ton mass, and then, with no other motive power than an old horse windlassing a rope round a capstan as a winch, which had to be moved and reanchored as the truck with its load was drawn up to it, he and his fifteen-year-old son, working so quietly during the winter that not even the nearest neighbor suspected what they were doing, dragged the mass three-quarters of a mile on to his own land.
Apparently this mass of iron was known before the discovery above related, as an Indian relic, revered from time immemorial by the Siwash Indians. When the Portland Land Company, who owned the land on which the meteorite was found, instituted legal proceedings in the matter, claiming the right of possession, the lawyer engaged by Ellis Hughes to plead his cause was of the opinion that the meteorite was not “real estate,” but “discarded personal property,” belonging to whoever might find it. In support of this statement he called a very old Siwash Indian as a witness, who testified that the mass of iron had long been known to members of his tribe, who attributed to it magic virtue. As a youth, he said, he had been conducted to it by one of the medicine-men, and informed that if arrows were dipped in the water which collected in the hollows they would always wing their way to the heart of the game shot at. However, the judge ruled that the meteorite went with the land, and an order was issued giving possession thereof to the Portland Land Company. It was purchased later on by Mrs. William E. Dodge, and presented to the Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Near the Willamette meteorite is one called the Canyon Diablo, famous chiefly on account of the fact that it contains diamonds. It was found in 1891, near Coon Butte, Arizona, in the neighborhood of the town of Canyon Diablo. The original size of the mass is not known, but thousands of fragments have been collected, varying in weight from a fraction of an ounce up to 1,087 pounds. More than sixteen tons of this material are said to have been found within a radius of two and a half miles of Coon Butte, a conical hill rising from 130 to 160 feet above the surrounding plain, and containing a crater-like hollow about three-quarters of a mile in diameter and probably originally 1,460 feet deep. The appearance of this region seems at first sight, to the casual visitor, far more suggestive of a terrific explosion at a remote period of the past, resulting in an upheaval causing the vast crater from which the meteoritic-looking masses scattered over the surrounding plain had been ejected, but Dr. Hovey is of the opinion that their presence has been caused by the downfall of an immense meteorite from above. According to his investigations of the scene, “there is no lava of any kind in Coon Butte or in its immediate vicinity, such as is found in volcanic regions.” He also asserts that the main part of the mass has not yet been discovered, the fragments so far found being only the portions separated from the original mass during its passage through the atmosphere and at the time of its impact with the earth. There are two fragments of the Canyon Diablo meteorite in the Foyer collection, and the largest piece discovered is the one weighing 1,087 pounds, to which reference has already been made. A slice of the meteorite, in which a diamond was found, undoubtedly attracts the greatest amount of attention from visitors to the museum. “Diamonds falling from the sky,” they have been heard to remark, “then why not make a search for the missing fragment which may be a depository of unknown wealth?” However, the possibilities are that it has buried itself to such a depth in its crash to earth, that a search for it would be a stupendous undertaking, with possibly no results as far as diamonds are concerned.
The importance attached to the discovery of diamonds in the Canyon Diablo meteorite hinges upon the well-known fact that the diamond is the purest carbon in nature. Charcoal is almost pure carbon, and, as everyone knows, common charcoal is the product of combustion, the residue from the burning of a piece of woody tissue excluded from the air. This is the everyday teaching of chemistry in the college laboratory. According to Dr. Hovey, regarding the fact that the Canyon Diablo meteorite contains diamonds, “This gem-stone diamond has been definitely proved to occur in only two meteorites, the other being a Russian fall, although many masses are known to contain carbon in the form of a soft, black powder.” The discovery of diamonds in Canyon Diablo was made in 1891, by Professor G. A. Koenig of Philadelphia, and was afterward confirmed by Dr. George F. Kunz of New York, Professor Moissau of Paris, and other investigators. In 1905, Moissau dissolved a fragment of Canyon Diablo weighing several pounds, and obtained not only recognizable crystals of the diamond, but also crystals of a mineral corresponding exactly in composition to the extremely hard artificial silicide of carbon known as carborundum. The new mineral has been named Moissauite, and this is the first time that it has been found in nature.
Geology teaches us not only that charcoal and the mineral coals are different forms of that wonderful element we call carbon, but also that bituminous and anthracite coals are the transformed products of ancient vegetation, through the combined agencies of heat, enormous pressure, and the slow transmuting effect of ages. This talismanic element is ever found associated in some form with organic substance, and organic substance is life substance, animal as well as vegetable.
Hence comes the all-engrossing conclusion that wherever carbon exists there organic matter exists or has existed; and, if organic matter, then its essential companion life! Does the meteoric fragment Canyon Diablo, which fell from the sky upon our planet, come from a world now or at one time the abode of life? Seemingly, we have drifted back to the original argument, Did life first come to this earth in a meteor? and we are no nearer a solution of the problem unless—as some one facetiously remarked, an enterprising individual inclosed a message within a meteor ere it took its departure for our planet from some distant world. As Flammarion says in his book on _The Plurality of Worlds_: “The problem remains the same. We want to know how life first appeared, and this problem has not been advanced in the slightest degree by the theory adopted by Lord Kelvin and Arrhenius.” But, as already stated, no one dreamed of taking the suggestion made by Lord Kelvin, seriously.
THE END
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Footnote 1:
Chambers’s _Story of the Comets_, pp. 211–212.
Footnote 2:
_Journal_ of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xxiii. Account of comets given by Mohammedan historians.
Footnote 3:
This disposes of the story according to which, when the reporter of a Sydney newspaper asked the writer if she had discovered any comets, she modestly replied, “Yes, a few.”
Footnote 4:
_Nature_, June 16, 1887.
Footnote 5:
See Flammarion’s _History of the Heavens_, p. 348.
Footnote 6:
_Monthly Notices_, R.A.S., vol. vii, p. 73, March, 1846.
Footnote 7:
See _Astronomische Nachrichten_, vol. 104, p. 129.
Footnote 8:
The camera with which the meteor was photographed by Dr. W. J. S. Lockyer is placed specially for recording meteors. It is orientated to the polar stars simply for the purpose of being able to identify the stars to deduce the path of the meteor, should one be recorded. Otherwise, no interest is attached to the polar star trails, as such.
Footnote 9:
In Rebièrés’ _Les Femmes dans la Science_ he writes as follows about Madame Lepaute: “A little girl of six years when taunted one day by her sister with the remark, ‘I am prettier than you,’ made the ready rejoinder, ‘But I am wiser.’ The future career of Nicole Rêine Étable de la Briére, afterwards wife of the famous clock-maker, Jean André Lepaute, proved the truthfulness of her boast.”
Footnote 10:
Perihelion about February, 1986. The comet probably will be first seen during the spring of 1965.
Footnote 11:
It is now thought that the temperature of such small bodies will never have been high enough to call them suns. Eddington says a mass one-eighth of that of the sun would be required for this.
Footnote 12:
Perturbations will make very great changes in the orbits. The perihelion distance of Pons-Winnecke has increased twenty million miles or more in the past sixty years.
Footnote 13:
Recent papers tend to the conclusion that the transformation from giants to dwarfs is very slow. Jeans and Jeffreys both think that the change in the sun in 1,000 million years has been slight.
Footnote 14:
On rare occasions meteors have fallen on houses, as in the case of the Strathmore meteorite, photographed by H. Coates. He also took a photograph of Outh Lodge, Keithick, on which the meteorite fell, December 3, 1917. It made a hole in the roof of the house. The owners thereof, Mr. and Mrs. Hill, are included in the photograph, which was sent to the writer by Mr. W. E. Denning.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
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137 would approach the comet with would approach the planet with retrograde retrograde
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last chapter. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.