Beyond Our Senses

Exploring the Universe. By Henahaw Ward. (Brentano's.

- 10s. Od.) -

No book in the " To-day and To-morrow 7 series surpasses Eos in brilliance and profundity, for one of the best brains engaged in research gives us here the fruits of long laboUr in terms that all may understand. Indeed, the author's Comparisons would seem almost frivolous were it not necessary: to stab us wide awake with arresting analogies in order to make Us understand with our semi-mediaeval minds man's true

place in Cosmos. •

In the history of earth, man is a baby creature. He has only just arrived to pry into her secrets, to burrow into her inside, to burn her forests, to mar her beauty, and to puzzle his little head aboid her meaning; A long period of inquiry stretches ahead of him before he can even begin to consider

liimself. an adult. "A million million years henc!, as fat as we can see, the sun will probably still be much as now

and the earth will be revolving round it much as now." Mankind will be three million times as old and perhaps as- Wise as now, but at present we are it-the-birth of humanity, a babe whose interest until the last few moments has centred' exclusively on cradle and feeding bottles. '

From' our little peaks in Darien we are learning to focus Our eyes on illimitable horizons. Only since the last few licks of the clock has our awakening brain begun to wonder! at the nniverses swimming into our ken. Perhaps our own, lives are lived at the most immortal moment for humanitYv

Great discoveries will be made in the future, but never again: shall we live through these transcendent" present years during which the immensity of the outer world has dawned on us- we glory. Space perhaps is not limitless. Ten million light years might take us round it, but " we begin to realize that Our terrestrial physics and chemistry :are only. the !outmost fringes of far4eaching sciences. Beyond the sea:shore we have explored in our laboratories; lieS the Ocean vihose-ekistenc_ We are just beginning, to suspect." As an infant three days old, humanity_ cannot he a very confident_ interpreter of &- universe which it has only just discovered, but sooner or later the pieces of the puzzle must begin to fit together. Our author ends on the note of the Vedantists ." Ever the old question .obtrudes itself as te _whether tile- infant- hits any means of knowing that it is not dreaming all the tinie. We, picture it sees may be merely a creation of its own mind,. iq'k.nothinj reallz exists -except:itselfl the universe whicl#

_ 7. - -‘• eve study with such care -may •lic a dream, and we brain-cells in ;She mind of the dreamer."

Mr. Henshaw Ward's purpose is wider, for he takes the Whole range of mOdern science as his pasture, not the heaven's alone. He also has made a most remarkable book, whose moral is much the same as that of Eos.

In the sunshine_ of natural law we have nothing to fear. -to some people each discovery of law is a grief : " they assume that horrible matter is being exalted and heavenly spirit destroyed," but science has not and never will desecrate -the sanctuary of -life : our hopes will never lie slaughtered before its altar.

" Some day," says Mr; Ward, " a Swift will satirize the squeamishness which curtains the poetry of the origin Of life while it placards all civilization with the horrors of murder and adultery." We agree. The dance of Chromosomes that move themselves out of a jumble and range themselves in a mystic Lancers across the centre of the cell—when' will sorry Carlyle tell the story of these strange struggles with the pen that wrote The Night of Spurs? To these ninety-six elironni- somes comes an order (and who is He who gives it ?) to break -ranks. The dancers gather at the poles of the cell. An -invisible chord contracts its centre. Soon it splits, equipped with an apparatus for division whereby through a million births, each of which is an unimaginable miracle, a child is born. And although

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science has penetrated to the exact measurement of the incon- ceivable minuteness of an electron, though it has stretched its yard-stick across the reaches of uncounted stellar systems, still we are no nearer to the ultimate secrets of what matter is Or what Space is. In fact both matter and space have become all the more mysterious. Though science has peered deep into germ-cell- and measured some of the mechanism, we are farther than ever from the hope of creating a little home out of chemicals."

What is an egg ? For forty years the author tells us he diligently pondered spiritual values before he considered the mystery. We are brothers to the savage, " heedful of nothing that is usual, struck by anything that has a strange glint."

But we do not do justice to Mr. Ward by such considerations.

He is telling us, on the whole, not arguing. tells us, to begin with, of the swarm of universes that astronomy. has revealed, and of the geology of half a billion years, then we consider with him the whirlpools of sun and earth which make our weather and explore the molecules in a drop of water by enlarging it in imagination until we 'can roam in its universe. Then. we shrink ourselves to a thousandth of a pin-point and see how the cells co-operate in a tree to build up its leafy heights and spreading roots ; then we dive int0 our own blood stream and explore the nerves that raise our arm. Finally we look into our own brain and into the eternal cells of the life to conic ; after this, if we have breath and wits about us still, we conic to the final section dealing, With the explorations of- to-morrow and take a glance at relativity. It is an amazing and delightful hook. Not often is a reviewer privileged to spend such happy hours as he his done in the ebinpany. of Sir J. II. Jeans and Mr. Ward. Both authors.ea- n be read for entertainment much as for instruction : they will serve also to confirm rather than to -loosen faith, for the only religion science- can destroy,

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is some false and" materialistic creed. F. Y.-B.