Publisher's Synopsis
This book will probably open the way to some lively discussion among the Scientists, to whom it throws down the glove in very knightly style. The author's theory in brief is set forth in this paragraph from page 17:
"The whole globe was once a molten mass too hot to maintain life. The polar regions were then too hot for that purpose. These same regions are now too cold to maintain such life as we find on other parts of the earth. Nothing, then, can be more obvious than that the temperature of these now frigid zones, in sliding gradually from the first extreme of heat to the last extreme of cold, must have passed slowly through all the grades of temperature and climatic conditions which were exactly suited at one time or another to all the varieties of plants and animals which now live or ever have lived on the earth."
The conclusion therefore is that all life began in the arctic zone, and as the cooling process went on toward the equator, this life, vegetable and animal, followed it down through the temperate zone and into the tropical. And this theory is maintained with an ingenuity of argument, and a massing of facts, which will surely win the admiration of the reader; and, whether convinced or not, will compel the admission that the author has thought long and well on the subject, and reasons it out with all the severity of logic and statement belonging to a scientific treatise.
- "The Universalist Quarterly and General Review," Vol. 40
