Harrisburg telegraph. [volume] (Harrisburg, Pa.) 1879-1948, 1919-08-21
Scientific Discussions
by Garrett P. Serviss

cause or the former Senlal climate
in the Polar regions, which has been
revived by Stefansson's discovery OF
coal on a new land within the Arctic
circle, two correspondents simultan-
eously champion the theory that the
great climatic change was due TO
an alteration in the position of the
earths axis of rotation. And both
find support for the theory in the
story of the disappearance of the
mammoths. One of them says:
The aXial change was undoubt-
edly due to u cosmic accident, be-
cause what apparently occurred was
violent, sudden change, as evil
denced by the overwhelming of the
large animals feeding on tropical
vegetation by an instant drop to Arc
tic frigidity, which caused them to
be frozen solid and to be so COM
pletely incased in ice as to preserve
their flesh and stomach contents for
many thousands of years"
Now, whatever may have been the
case millions of years ago, when the
coal beds were deposited, it is GER
tain that there has been no tropical
climate in the Arctic regions and no
great and sudden change in the
time in which the large animals re-
ferred to, viz, the mammoths, lived
in Siberia and Alaska.
They seem to have reached their
meridian in the Pleistocene epoch,
during which the great glacial in
vasions occurred, and they were con-
temporary with early man in Eu-
rope. Whatever the nature of the
accidents by which their bodies were
embedded and frozen in the muddy
soil of the Siberian tundra, it can
not have been due to a sudden drop
to frigidity in the climate, because
the mammoth was distinctly a cold
weather animal, specially clothed
with long, heavy hair, supplemented
with thick underwood.
He was used to an Arctic climate
and so fond of the cold that when
the ice during the glacial epoch ad-
vanced southwark these huge man.
mails followed it, carrying their
warm garments of hair and wool
with them, as is sufficiently proved
by the drawings that the men of the
old Stone Age left on cavern walls
and elsewhere on their gigantic ele-
phantine contemporaries.
1t is probable that the preserva-
ton of so many bodies of mammals
in the frozen mud-sinks along ST.
berian and Alaskan rivers was due
to local causes, such as thaws and
floods, instead of to any vast and
sudden climatic change affecting a
whole hemisphere. AS to the sup
position that they fed on tropical
vegetation. read the following, writ
ten in 1915 by DR.. w. d. Matthew,
a foremost authority on this subject.
He is speaking of the bodies of man.
moths found in Siberia and Alaska:
The contents of the stomach
show that these animals fed upon
the same vegetation, grasses and
sedges. birches, alders, poplars. ETC.,
that prevails to-day in the far
north"
In word, the mammoth belonged
to a much later age than that when
genial climates prevailed nearly all
over the earth, even including the
Arctic and Antarctic lands. To re-
turn to what seems to be the most
popular theory of the cause of that
genial period and of it's disappear
ance, viz, a change in the earth's
axis of rotation. we may take up
Professor w. c. Pickering's sugges-
ton that all the planets formed by
the breaking up and condensation of
rings left off during the contraction
of the original nebula from which
the solar system was developed,
would, at first, rotate on their axis
in retrograde direction, /. e., con-
trary to their revolution around the
sun.
This appears to be an inevitab able
result of the inverse square law as
applied to the velocity of particles
revolving at slightly different dis
tances from their common center
of motion. The outer particles of
n ring travelling slower than the in
ner ones, when the ring becomes a
globular planet the effect of this diff
ference in velocity would be a back
ward rotation.
But the tides produced in the un-
solidifed planets by the attraction
of the sun would, in a manner tho
details which cannot be entered
upon here, produce a gradual re-
versal of the direction of rotation
by tipping the axis over. The end
of this process would be reached
when the axis, having been tipped
over end for end, was brought into a
position at right angles to the plane
of the planets revolution around
the sun, the planet then rotating in
a forward direction, after which
there would be no change.
Now it is a fact of observation
that the outermost planet of the
solar system, Neptune, still rotates
backward, while the next nearer one.
Uranus, appears to be approaching
the point of change from a back
ward to a forward rotation. That
Saturn and Jupiter once rotated
backward seems to be indicated by
the retrograde revolution of their
most distant satellites. The earth
has passed into the state of forward
or direct rotation but it's axis is still
more than 23 degrees from perpen-
dicularity to the ecliptic.
Extremely interesting possibilities
depend upon these considerations,
but they relate to an immense an
tiquity, and there is no room to dis
cuss them here. Another time they