EVOLUTION: WHAT IT IS NOT, AND WHAT IT IS. 639 



without a world to grow them in. The science of the stars was there- 

 fore reduced to comparative system and order, Avhile the sciences of 

 life, and mind, and matter were still a hopeless and inextricable mud- 

 dle. It was no wonder, then, that the evolution of the heavenly bodies 

 should have been clearly apprehended and definitely formulated while 

 the evolution of the earth's crust was still imperfectly understood, and 

 the evolution of living beings was only tentatively and hypothetically 

 hinted at in a timid whisper. 



In the beginning, say the astronomical evolutionists, not only this 

 world, but all the other worlds in the universe, existed potentially, as 

 the poet justly remarks, in "a haze of fluid light," a vast nebula of 

 enormous extent and almost inconceivable material thinness. The 

 world arose out of a sort of primitive world-gruel. The matter of 

 which it was composed was gas, of such an extraordinary and unim- 

 aginable gasiness that millions of cubic miles of it might easily be 

 compressed into a common antibilious pill-box. The pill-box itself, in 

 fact, is the net result of a prolonged secular condensation of myriads 

 of such enormous cubes of this primeval matter. Slowly setting 

 around common centers, however, in anticipation of Sir Isaac New- 

 ton's gravitative theories, the fluid haze gradually collected into suns 

 and stars, whose light and heat are presumably due to the clashing to- 

 gether of their component atoms as they fall perpetually toward the 

 central mass. Just as in a burning candle the impact of the oxygen 

 atoms in the air against the carbon and hydrogen atoms in the melted 

 and rarefied wax or tallow produces the light and heat of the flame, 

 so in nebula or sun the impact of the various gravitating atoms one 

 against the other produces the light and heat by whose aid we are 

 enabled to see and know those distant bodies. The universe, accord- 

 ing to this now fashionable nebular theory, began as a single vast 

 ocean of matter of immense tenuity, spread all alike over all space as 

 far as nowhere, and comparatively little different within itself when 

 looked at side by side with its own final historical outcome. In Mr. 

 Spencer's perspicuous phrase, evolution in this aspect is a change from 

 the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the incoherent to the co- 

 herent, and from the indefinite to the definite condition. Difficult 

 v\^ords at first to apprehend, no doubt, and therefore to many peo- 

 ple, as to Mr. Matthew Arnold, very repellent, but full of meaning, 

 lucidity, and suggestiveness, if only we once take the trouble fairly 

 and squarely to understand them. 



Every sun and every star thus formed is forever gathering in the 

 hem of its outer robe upon itself, forever radiating off its light and 

 heat into suiTounding space, and forever growing denser and colder 

 as it sets slowly toward its center of gravity. Our own sun and 

 solar system may be taken as good typical working examples of how 

 the stars thus constantly shrink into smaller and ever smaller dimen- 

 sions around their own fixed center. Naturally, we know more about 



