The Torch-Bearers

Abstract

MR. NOYES has followed up his first volume of “Torch-bearers,” which was reviewed in these columns on May 20,1922, by a second and rather larger book, volume ii., with the sub-title of “The Book of Earth.” It will be remembered that the first volume was inspired by a night spent in the Sierra Madre Mountains when the first trial was made of the new 100-inch telescope, and it treated of the growth of astronomy from Copernicus to Herschel. It was a notable attempt to carry out the destiny predicted for poetry both by Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold in Great Britain, to express the truths of science in the sort of language which had always served mankind as the vehicle of the highest and eternal ideas. We hailed it as such and are glad to think that the three years since its publication have deepened the public appreciation of Mr. Noyes' effort. The second volume will not be found to belie these expectations. It deals with a much more difficult subject from the point of view of poetic presentation, namely, biology, or rather geology as a preface to zoology and evolution as crowning geology. It leaves one in some doubt as to the scope of the third volume which we are promised in the preface to the first. Is the biology to be completed? Heaven, earth and man would seem to be the natural division. Yet in this second volume we are brought down to Huxley at the famous Oxford meeting of the British Association: so what remains for the third, unless it is to be devoted to relativity and the general philosophical change in scientific ideas which has taken place in the twentieth century?

The Torch-Bearers.

By Alfred Noyes. Vol. 2: The Book of Earth. Pp. vii + 375. (Edinburgh and London: Wm. Blackwood and Sons, 1925.) 7s. 6d. net.