240 TIME, SPACE, AND INVISIBLE WORLDS. 



waters, we read, shall we say, the earliest conditions and environ- 

 ment of organic life, the hidden dawn of mind, its first contact 

 with Terrestrial matter, and lastly, the first stage in that great drama 

 of Creation, as revealed in those significant words, "Darkness was 

 upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was brooding 

 upon the face of the waters." 



Noticeable among the characteristics of life, when once it 

 became established upon Earth, are its immense variety, fecundity, 

 persistency, and universality. Tyndall speaks of indurated germs 

 which hours of boiling do not kill. Drummond reminds us of 

 " the almost incalculable fecundity of the first created forms of 

 life," and again of a " cloud of progeny of uncountable millions 

 of spores ; also of common births of a million each, and a mother- 

 hood in twelve days of sixteen millions of young." Philosophy 

 has been asking for a thousand years, — " What is the meaning of 

 all things ? " Revelation long ago solved the mystery in one 

 word, — " Life." Geology out of its rocky depths of fossilised 

 organisms likewise answers — " Life." Mountain, lake, plain, river, 

 forest, desert, ocean, and the air we breathe, each and all respond 

 with, because full of — " Life." In arctic cold, as well as torrid 

 heat, we have the same repeated story of — "Life." And the Stars 

 in distant space are now, in their gentle light, sending us intima- 

 tions of kinship with Earth and Sun ; in all of which we read a 

 like end and destiny — the Continuity of Life. 



Analogical reasoning has largely forced the conclusion among 

 astronomers that our Solar system at one time existed as a gigantic 

 nebula, similar in appearance, and probably in nature, to those 

 which the telescope descries as bordering on the Milky Way. 

 Probably homogeneous as an incipient nebula, by what means the 

 misty primitive matter evolved into separate discrete elements, is 

 one of the many profound mysteries in Nature. Neither can the 

 force be explained which originated its rotation, and finally resolved 

 the nebula into a series of gigantic ball furnaces, hotter by far than 

 the fiercest heat artificially produced. The final issue, only, we 

 apprehend in the many " elementary " substances which, sep- 

 arately or combined, make up the Earth upon which we dwell. 

 It seems not unreasonable to deduce from these conclusions that 

 our Planets, being simply off-shoots or detachments from the Sun, 



