OUR CINDER IN SPACE
Judson, Sheldon
Our Cinder in Space The Earth We Live On, by Ruth Moore. Knopf. 416 pp. $6. Reviewed by Sheldon Judson THREE years ago Ruth Moore authored the successful Time, Man, and Fossils, a competent and...
...But what she has cov-ered is well-done and in total aspect the reader is treated to a surprisingly coherent picture of our knowledge of the physical earth and how it has been acquired...
...The fabric of geologic knowledge is woven slowly...
...I could not help but feel as I read it that here was a book which could be profitably and enjoyably perused by students of geology...
...The second epoch deals with the natural historians of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries who demonstrated that by "going and looking" they could explain the processes which created the rocks of the earth and modeled the present landscape...
...Miss Moore obviously has expend-ed much time and effort gathering her basic information...
...And for the-most part she has used the informa-tion judiciously...
...Having said this much it is only fair to add that the weakest portion of this book is that which deals with the recent work in the field...
...They and Miss Moore would be the first to admit that they do not...
...And they both would admit that many of the theories, suppositions, and even conclusions being formulated today may not stand the test of time...
...Such a story could rightly include the distant, non-hominid ancestors of man...
...The first takes brief notice of speculations by the Greek philosophers through Aristotle and of the influence of the Biblical story of the flood on geologic thinking through the Seventeenth Century...
...The current ad--vances in geology are depicted through sketches of several distinguished contemporary earth scientists...
...Perhaps in 50 years we can look back to the mid-Twentieth Century and say with some assurance that this man and this idea were significant for the time and for our understanding of the earth...
...She tells it in chronologic order from the ancient Greeks to the mid-Twentieth Century scientists...
...This book is by no stretch of the imagination a textbook...
...But she leaves behind the more widely popularized fields of organic evolution and anthropology and turns her reporter's eye (for Miss Moore covers science for the Chicago Sun-Times) on what she calls the "story of geological discovery...
...The subject matter is itself fascinating Miss Moore heightens its interest by telling the story through lively vig nettes of the men intimately con-cerned with the development of those ideas...
...This then is a story of ideas...
...Miss Moore tells the story of man's quest for an understanding of that cinder in space which is his world...
...In her latest book, The Earth We Live On, Miss Moore is still concerned with the past, and very successfully so...
...The facts of her story, therefore, are essentially those of the physical world, rather than those of the biological world which formed the core of her earlier venture into earth history...
...ies concerning the earth, its origu|| and its construction...
...Through no fault of Miss Moore or her subjects, the technique employed gives the impression that these scientists stand alone in their contributions...
...To be sure, she has not exhausted the field, nor even attempted to...
...There is no stand.-ard textbook which provides the sweeping view that Miss Moore has sketched of the science...
...And happily she manages to avoid over dramatization, an unfortunate ten dency that often crops up in popular-ization of science...
...Finally, W the present era, new techniques arftl the data from the sister fields ffl chemistry and physics are pictured al leading us to startling new discover...
...The framework of the story is simple...
...But Miss Moore has restricted her reporting to the origin and nature of the earth...
...This is due in part to the way in which the material is handled...
...Reviewed by Sheldon Judson THREE years ago Ruth Moore authored the successful Time, Man, and Fossils, a competent and intriguing account of the development of paleontology, evolution, and archaeology...
...Four epochs mark man's thought about his earth...
...That volume was one of the first of the recent deluge of accounts of man's ancestors...
...She writes deftly and well...
...This logically led to a third period of thought which Miss Moore chooses to end early in the Twentieth Century, a period which saw the synthesis of many observations into more sophisticated explanations of such phenomena as mountain Mtmm ing and earth formation...
...It should give them a feel for the science and for the men who have made it...
...It is precise-ly what it was intended as: a book for the general public...
Vol. 21 • February 1957 • No. 2
