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Chapter V. Salts and the Crust of The Earth. Protoplasm.The Centrifugal Compressive Force. All the compressive forces acting around an active solar centre to condense new and more compounded substantial from the foam-texture of the surrounding aura, are centrifugal radiant forces. The means of this compression is the action of the whirling gyres excited in the aura by the presence and power of the active centre. For the whirling volume, begun near the sun, everywhere drives outward against the resisting expanse of aura round about. One portion of the aura coerces and presses another portion,—the momentum of that portion which is in motion, acting against the portion at rest, with a subtle, irresistible force. It is in this manner that the third finites were compressed from the first aura, and it is thus that the fourth finites. of which the planets were shaped, were compressed from second aura. The Centripetal Compressive Force. The compressing instrumentality brought into action about the earths, to bring forth the waters and the angular particles or the salts, is the very reverse of the compressive force active about a sun. It is a centripetal force, a force originating not from an expansive but from a contractive effort of an aura or ether—not from a higher and finer foam ether in whirling motion, but from a lower and coarser foam ether, in all its volume chilling and contracting. This type of compressive force can only affect planetary bodies and their immediate vicinage; and their own surrounding volumes of third and fourth aura are the ministering means of the compression. This compression commenced at the period when the two terrestrial atmospheres, already fully formed, began to be carried by their mother earth farther and farther from the genial circle of greater solar light and heat. For as the mother earth carried them into regions continually further remote and more chill, they themselves began to contract as they cooled; and not only did they thus contract individually or as to every bullular unit, but as a whole or en masse. Then the force of the progressive cooling and constriction of so vast a volume of ether, everywhere directed by narrowing radii inward upon the parent earth, began to produce great and wonderful results. The earth-globe itself could not be further compressed by the contractive pressures of the cooling volume of ether thus determined, and as it were focussed, upon its surface. For the globe was already absolutely dense and resistant; nor could it be thrust from its position, since it lay as it were sustained on all sides by centripetal pressures and equal force. The Compression of the Fourth Aura, or Air. It was the comparatively small volume of fourth aura, the aereal elementary, massed about the earth, that could be affected by this contractive pressure. For the volume of aereal elementary could be caught, as it were, between the anvil and the hammer, between the earth and the pressing contracting ether. Something must yield; and the bullae, large, sluggish, gross, of the fourth atmosphere, were the only forms in that locality apt to yield. Under the growing pressure, then, of the whole contracting volume, the elastic bullae of the fourth aura, near the surface of the earth, grew denser and denser, smaller and smaller; until vast volumes of them were reduced to small, hard, non-bullu1ar, spherical masses, resistant, and inert.192 The Primeval Ocean. These new forms, hard, inelastic, round, were the primitive molecules of water; and the volume of such hard molecules, produced about the earth, was rendered fluent, and the molecules themselves movable, one among another, by the ether or third atmosphere interfluent in their interstices.193 There was formed at length a vast sea of such water particles, miles in depth, fluent about the planetary mass. This was the great unsalted sea, or primeval ocean, which first swept around the globe.194 Formation of the Salt Molecule. The effect of the contractive pressures did not stop here. Compression was able to go a step further. The molecules or units of this vast sea were still spherical in form, and being spherical their surfaces pressed each other only at their points of mutual contact. The interstitial spaces between them presented places and planes of less pressure or resistance. If, then, the pressure acting upon them grew great enough, here and there the circumference of the hard, round forms would begin to yield in the direction of lesser pressure, and as it were bulge and give way toward the interstitial spaces. The whole little mass of any round water particle, thus yielding, would be crushed into a new form, a form moulded after the shape of the interstice existing between the adjacent round particles which still retained their integral roundness. Plate VIII represents nine molecules of water, the central molecule being the first to yield to the pressure. As its envelope, composed of fifth finites, must be the first to give way, its substance will pass into the adjacent interstitial spaces, shown in plate IX, and the adjoining round water molecules settling closer in upon the crushed and yielding particle, it will be pressed into the shape shown in plate X; this shape will be composed of a central cubic block, consisting of the nuclear core of the original water particle,a cubic block, therefore, of metallic primitives. At each angle of this central cube will be a tetrahedron block, formed of the fifth finites from the surface of the compressed particle of water. This cubic block, Swedenborg terms an alkaline particle; the tetrahedral blocks are acid particles. Therefore the primeval sea salt, as a compound of both forms, the alkaline and the acid, is basic.
The sides of all angular particles so produced, are of course slightly concave, being moulded to the convexity of the surrounding round particles.197
This fits them to connect with any kind of round particles of suitable size, in a sort of ball and socket fashion. It is in this manner that the crystallization of salt takes place; the round molecular particles, necessary to build up the structure of the crystalline mass, being furnished by the water of crystallization.198 These complex angular particles, thus formed at the bottom of the ocean, are the very primitives of the halogen salts and other typical bases. As they were actually formed in situ at the bottom of the sea, from water particles, and among water particles, they were formed most perfectly and most abundantly. The water particles left uncrushed among them, acted the part of the water molecules of crystallization. The result was the formation of a vast layer of rock salt at the bottom of the sea.199 This was the last great effect of the contractive pressure of the cooling ether volume. It was by the wash from this substratum of crystalline salt that the great primeval sea of sweet water grew salt, and is to this day the salt-mother of the earth and storehouse of the basic angular particles of creation. The Ramenta of Broken Salt Particles. Another form comes into notice here, or rather a part of the form presented by the primevally perfect angular particles of rock salt. Certain delicate wing-like projections exist on every side. They are ramenta curved like the blade of a sickle, thick on the convex edge, but very fine on the concave. These ramenta are formed of finer finites than the main mass, disintegrated from the coarser, which exist in some near interstice. Every angular or block particle formed in that deep crystalline bed of salt in the depths of the primeval sea, was thus delicately winged at its edges. As the sea dissolved layer after layer of the salt particles, these delicate lamellar portions were broken off by the attrition of that process; and clouds as it were of them must have been loosened, freed, and drifted to and fro in the water of the deep sea. The Primitives of Carbon. Forms of this type have potencies of use of their own. They are the angular or inert particles which are the mother or passive particles generic to the oils, the animal spirits, the formative substance of animals and of plants. Bullular particles of water vapor, of the ether, the auras, give the active or father element. The passive ramental fragments cover the envelopes of the bullae, either singly or in volume. Bullae of the ether thus encrusted and loaded with the finest ramented edges, broken from the angular particles of primeval salts, are thus the very basic, generic factors of the oils and spirits and the formative substances of plants, or what emulates spirits in them.203 Now in the depths of the primal sea, in the plane where the bed of rock salt was dissolving, the conditions, the necessary factors for the formation of the primal oils, or hydro-carbons, and the formative substance or seed of vegetative life, not only existed, but existed abundantly, and existed in juxtaposition. The attrition of the primal keen-edged perfect salts as they dissolved must have given rise to a vast first production of such free ramental particles; the tendency of which is to attach themselves to any free ether bullae or volumes adjacent. The first formation of Oils or Hydrocarbons. Meanwhile, the conditions of dissolution of salt in the water would cause free volumes of ether bul1ae to rise everywhere in bubbles from the depth where the salt was dissolving, to the surface of the sea. For the salt particles dissolving in water, do not increase the volume of water, because they only fill and occupy the interstices of the water particles.—Therefore, as the salt of the rock-salt bed dissolves in the wash of the primal sea resting upon it, the interfluent ether, or "subtle matter" rises to the surface in the shape of bubbles; and its place is occupied by the salts.205 Thus all through the lower level of the sea where the dissolving salt is giving rise to a cloud or sphere of ramental particles, the volumes of displaced ether will be rising among them and mounting to the surface in bubbles. It was thus that oils or hydrocarbons first originated in the primal sea. Origin of the Earth-Crust. Under the conditions just postulated for the primal sea, the displaced and ascending bubbles of ether cannot but attract to themselves the abundant ramental particles or flakes broken from the fine curving edges of the first angular or salt forms, and act as their carriers to the upper regions of the sea. From this cause there arises at length a kind of crust, or covering-over of all the surface of the quiet sea. This crust will be composed mainly of the bullae of the ether of the third order, loaded thus with fine ramental particles. Among these encrusted bullae of the ether will be drifts and heaps of free ramental carbonaceous particles, together with many salt particles, acid and alkaline, rising entangled in the groups of ascending oily bubbles. This first delicate crust will be thickened continually from below, by the new ramental-ladened bubbles of ether rising from the ocean depths, where the salt of the great primal rock-salt layer is being dissolved. Moreover, some of the ramental fragments, carried above the surface of the sea and dispersed there by the breaking of bubbles, would readily transfer themselves to the interstices of the elementaries, and gather and encrust about the bullular particles of the watery vapor, formed in the lower layers of the warm, heavy brooding air pressing the surface of the sea. The latter form is carbonic acid, the "volatile urinous salt" of Swedenborgs's Chemistry; formed also of the exhalations sent out in the course of the purification of the sera of the bloods in the lungs.208 The Formative Substance of the Vegetable Kingdom. The primitive globules of the ether-oils or spirits, the ramental-laden volumes and bullae of ether, thus rising from the depths of the sea, and collecting on its surface, present in very form the first union of the bullae of the ether, as an active, with the first passive particles or angular forms of the earth. Such forms are the lowest in the series of the three formative substances of the degrees of the organic individuals, i. e., the vegetative. For the ether bullae thus surrounded and encrusted by the primal ramental fragments, literally constitute the life-formative, the cosmic seminal principle of the vegetative kingdom, and of the insect and coldblooded species of the animal kingdom.211 This first crust, almost liquid, delicately jelly-like, an oily visco-fluid foam superinduced over the surface of the warm quiet sea,—was formed then of bullae of the ether, the atmosphere of the third order, encrusted and clothed about with the finest passive angular particles, the curving ramental edges of the primitive broken salts; these ramental edges being broken away, in the depth of the sea, in the throb and slide of its motion over the rock-salt bed; and as the solid planet and liquid ocean revolve, it lifted and dissolved layer after layer of the great salt stratum formed in its depths. The first Seed-Soil. We are to think of this delicate crust, then, as the first ground of the earth. We are to think that all its masses or "clods" of ramental encrusted bullae were so many masses of the little active elastic globules, each embodying a minute volume of primal aura, enveloped in fourth finites, encrusted with ramental angular particles,—and capable of acting as the very formative substance of individuals, actively ultimating the vegetative and lower animal degrees of life. These fine bullae, thus clothed upon, or encrusted with such ramental particles, were as little seeds, or ova. Under touch of the celestial power and life which they clothed about, as soon as the heat of the sun gave expansion to their delicate surfaces they were able to combine, and as a very vegetative soul or principle, gathering to themselves waters and salts, to initiate the primordial germinations, in simple individuals, of the vegetative and animalculate life. Thus the first crust collecting over the warm primal salt sea, the first ground formed, was composed as it were of such little bullular ova, involving the very vital formatives of the vegetable life, and was as it were a soil of pure seed. Corroborative Evidences. In corroboration of Swedenborg's teaching as to the first great basic belt of rock-salt, formed at the bottom of the primal occan surrounding the earth, and the origin of the first oils or hydro-carbons in the primal ocean, from the dissolution and breaking up of the salt particles of the upper layers of that stratum, under the wash of the sea, the following may be of interest. The great mountains of salt, and the beds of rock-salt of the salt mines, are for the most part remnants of that great first bed of rock-salt formed in the depth of the primeval sea, the undissolved remnants being in later ages covered over and preserved by deposited strata of other matter.212 Now, as it happened at the first age of the earth, swiftly under the solvent action of the water, that the delicate ramental particles were detached from the fine cubes and triangles, and, adjoining themselves to the bullae or bubbles of the ether, gave origin to the first forms of oils or hydro-carbons; so later it happened, and happens still, in the rock-salt mines, but more slowly. And the action of this primal production of the oils is being paral1eled in the buried rock-salt beds, but on a smaller sca1e, and more slowly. Ramental particles are detached by slow attrition, escape and attach themselves to the adjacent bullae of the ether, both singly and in litt1e volumes, until stores of such loaded bullae, the hydro-carbons or oils of the mineral kingdom, are formed in the dark caverns and strata of the earth and accumulate in great pockets or wells among the adjacent pervious strata. Bitumen, asphalt, naptha, petroleum, are instances of such forms thus produced.218 This accounts for the fact, of so much interest to practical men, that inflammable gas is usually found in connection with beds of rock-salt. In a great salt mine in China, as well as in salt deposits in Hungary, gas is obtained directly from the beds of rock-salt. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, article on Gas.) Moreover the Encyclopaedia Britannica, article on rock-salt, notes that "the frequent association of bitumen and petroleum, with rock-salt and brine, is one of the most notable features in the geology of those substances; and seems to point to some unknown condition of the formation of the two first named." Growth of the Earth-Crust. Thus the earth surrounds itself with water, and afterwards with a fertile crust, a crust which in a state of resolution not only yields seeds, but unfolds them into different kinds of fruits and plants. Surrounded with water without a shore, a crust was superinduced, and all that we now find in the vegetable and mineral worlds was enabled to enter the crust. This crust was formed upon the waters by the dissolution of the parts in the water, and the interjections of finites, which emerged to the surface; and the crust continually increased by the addition of parts one under another. Protoplasm. At first the earth was as yet not earth, but surrounded by an uncovered wave, in a continual bubbling and effervescence from its bottom; presently the uncovered wave of the sea began to be covered by a coat, delicate and without density; but it became dense as it was increased by the affluence of particles emerging from beneath, until it was covered with a surface crust of small eggs or vesicular seeds of the future triple kingdom, each to come forth successively. Everywhere there was as it were something living in what was not living, or animate in what was not animate, which at length unfolded and opened itself. The first things produced in and from this warm slime of the sea, foamy, pure and tender, were the vegetative life and the complementary forms of the lower animalculate life. For this production only three things were necessary : (1) The finest yet primal oil globules, formed of bubbles of the ether, with the finest ramental angular particles of the earth's first salts, adjoined to them as by a marriage; the two being related as the soul and its body, or as the active center or internal of the sun, to its superinduced crustal body. (2.) Angular particles, salts, acids and alkalies, with their concave sides, to act as conjunctives. (3.) Water molecules, greater and less. Where these are, with fostering heat from the natural sun, with inflowing determinants from the Sun of life, they may at once be framed into the palpitant jelly-like mass, that vesicular or foam-structure, the protoplasm which is the physiological basis of the embryonic life, vegetable or animal. The life-formative Functions of the Ether. Of these three factors, the soul force is in the globules of the oil forms. For the life-formative, the seminal principle, is in the ether, the third degree of the Divine Proceeding, formed into atmosphere, or Use; and each globule of the oil has a nuclear volume of this ether. "The first generating or plastic force innate in the seeds of vegetable foetuses may be likened to a soul. Such genitures are from the conjunctive of the active forms constituting ether, with the inert powers of earth." That it is the ether of the third order which is the life-formative of the vegetable forms, see E. A. K., part II, 355; and also of the insect and lower animal life, see Corpuscular Philosophy and the previous references to the Worship and Love of God. But the second aura, or the ether of the second order, is the life-formative of the higher animal forms.210. And the first or universal aura gives the human life-formative. That such is the highest office in the universe, the living office of the atmospheres, which are the Proceeding Divine, as to Use, see the work on the Athanasian Creed, n. 26, 191. That this function, this power of the atmospheres, is an arcanum hitherto unknown; and that it is an essential of atmosphere,not only the spiritual atmosphere, but the natural,is noted in the Ath. Creed, n. 26; where the birth of insect forms, and the origin of the vegetative form is referred to the natural or terrestrial ether. To the ether as the vegetative soul, the Apocalypse Explained, n.1208, adds its testimonies. From it is the form of plants, and the building powers of coralline forms. Even the inert substances adjoined, the earths, the salts, the waters, have the urgency toward their uses, springing from like affections and conjoining with the active forces, to bring forth the mutual offspring of use or concrete structural forms.221 For the series of finiting, beginning in the Spiritual Sun, does not cease until in its last term, the quiescent matters of the terraqueous globe,222 in which its efforts are all gathered up.223 Hence in the ultimates of active forces, or the ether, and of passive forces, or angular particles, the creative power of the Lord acts in fullness and strength.224 This is the first sphere of all, the sphere of these inert particles, given off by the salt of the sea and married with the ether in the production of the formative substances, or active seminal principles of vegetative life. As for the third ether itself, the nuclear principle of its own bullae is a volume of the primal or celestial aura, which regards the Sun of Life alone. It is the celestial-natural degree of the Proceeding Divine, from which exists the conatus and actuality, in the forming force of vegetable life. Salt as the Conjunctive of Oil and Water. Angular particles, or salts, act as the intermediates or connectives of the higher oil forms, and the lower water forms. Albumen, blood, milk, are given as instances of this conjunctive action of salts, in framing substances into forms plastically co-active with the productive and operative forces of animal life. The type of reactive substances of materia arising from the coalescence of oils and "spirits" with water by means of the first salts, are noted as characteristic of the vegetable as well as of the animal kingdoms in E. A. K., part I. 75. The Corpuscular Philosophy notes that the whole vegetable kingdom is as it were formed of the little bullae of different kinds, or vesicles less and greater, determined by the enclosed ether, together with the surrounding salts. Revelation itself confirms this great testimony as to the conjunctive power of salt, which, it is stated in the Arcana Coelestia, n. 10300, "conjoins water and oil, which otherwise are not conjoined." In support of such a derivation of the basic bullular or foam-structure of the protoplasmic materia of forms capable of co-acting with life, that is, their derivation from oil, salt, and water, Butschli's famous work has come with triumphant emphasis. The first successful experiments, given in his work on Protoplasm and Microscopic Foams, were made from a bottle of olive oil that had long stood in the sun, and common salt finely ground, and water.228 For the wonderful work done with such foams, the interested reader is referred to the original volume. Here the quotation is adduced as a modern instance of what the Writings say as to the powers of salts to act as a conjunctive between water and oil; and an experimental confirmation of Swedenborg's statement that the structural result of such conjunctive action is the production of vesicles, bullae, or alveoli; which foam-type is given as characteristic of the structure of the minutest plastic particles, vegetative or otherwise, in which the life-formative immediately clothes itself about, and acts. To the confirmation of this, Andrews' study on the Living Substance gives emphatic testimony, as follows, "The structure of protoplasm, throughout the substance of all living organisms examined, except when secondarily altered, was found to be, as maintained by Butschli, that of a visco-fluid foam." For the origin of living functionating units or forms, giving out characteristic spheres,that is, for the bringing into existence of the reacting foam-structure, jelly-like, plastic, namely, the protoplasm of the simplest outermost forms of vegetative life, and of the animal life which is confined to the vegetative or third ether plane,nothing is needed but the presence of water and salt particles, and the primitive ethereal oils, moving under the determination of the celestial sphere in the ether itself, with its first produced vesicles brooded and warmed by long sunshine, in a moist pressing atmosphere. Rise of Animalculate Life. The first living form to open, to be born in and from this warm slime of the sea, pure, tender, was the simplest, lowest vegetative life, and the complex lower forms of animalculate life, which swim and fly, "foetuses which performed the exercises and offices of their life in a state of greater ignorance than other creatures," as befits the outmost life-formative, bodied in organs without basis of self-respective reflux.229 In the shaded depths of the sea, where the ether-bubbles, tangled in, did not rise, or did not rise far, their plastic force, as a seminal principle, coacting with homogenous exhalations of particles from below, framed the living forms of the deep sea ooze, the Foraminifera, whose little day of life is given to secreting into and about their tender bodies firmer matters, and delicate shells. When their own day of life is over, the fine shells they lived into being, stay. And of the accumulations of myriad generations of such, our basic limestones, even our basic siliceous formations, are posited.230 Indications remain still of the old source which Swedenborg postulates for the origin of such forms, and the conditions of salts, and ramental or carbonacious particles in their life environment. "Limestones often contain so large a proportion of bituminous matter, as to give off a distinct odor of petroleum when struck with a hammer." Later, the larger creatures, the scarcely living corals, set their tiny rock-bound bodies as steps for successive generations to climb by, to upper levels of island ring and reef. But over all the smooth wonder of the crustal covering of the sea, the living foam, the outputs of the seeking root, and the tinging leaf, began to be. Thus the first vegetative protoplasm took its rise in and from the purely jelly-like crustings of the primal sea, where the globules of ether-oil, the salts, the tangled mass of finites, the water particles, all, as they outwardly were warmed softly by the sun shining through the mists, were inwardly touched to living action by the celestial aura, imminent in every particle of ether-foam. And to this first source and conditionment of the spontaneous generation of primal forms of vegetative and animalculate life, the conditions under which the hell-broods of evil insect forms and evil animalculae came first and do still come to spontaneous generation, give the testimony of their mimicry. For they originated in "stagnant lakes, marshes, rank and fetid bodies."232 And the plastic force of nature flowing into the ethers, acts to originate forms, everywhere and anywhere, "whenever homogenous exhalations are present in nature."3 |
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