Excerpt from The Earth and Its Life No single man, if he spent his life in travel, could hope to gain more than an imperfect knowledge of a small portion of earth's surface. No man, whatever his gifts and industry, could hope to solve a millionth of the problems still unanswered concerning the earth and its life as we know it to-day. No one can say how old it is, yet we know that it is of an age so great that we cannot grasp it. We cannot conceive the slow processes that it passed through before it became a fit abode for life at all, nor the countless succeeding ages during which life was assuming its myriad forms. It took these vast stretches of time and these innumerable stages of development to make the earth and the life on it. The earth itself is the merest speck in the universe. It belongs to a system of which the star we call the sun is the centre; it depends upon the sun for its light and heat and life. The earth and other planets revolve round the sun, and the whole system, the solar system, as we call it, moves through space. The sun is one star. There are countless others. Some of these are centres of light and heat like the sun; others are travelling about in space, cold and dark. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.