LIFE ON WOELDS BERGET. 545 



stitutes the coronal atmosphere of the sun. These expelled particles 

 bear a negative electrical charge. They are going to come in contact 

 with these cold, gaseous masses of rarified molecules, containing 

 hehum and liydi-ogen, called ''nebulse." These nebulae contain a 

 very small number of molecules; hence their low temperature. When 

 the electrically charged particles reach them, the former make the 

 periphery luminous, and then these nebulae are visible to observers 

 on the earth; the dust which is agglomerated into meteorites, how- 

 ever, becomes centers of condensation for these nebulae. Let a dark 

 body, such as the moon is to-day, such as the sun will be later, 

 happen to penetrate into such surroundings in the course of its 

 peregrinations lasting myriads of centuries, it will become still more 

 easily a center about which nebulous matter would accumulate while 

 it becomes heated; the nucleus becomes incandescent, a sun will be 

 born. Finally, let two dark suns collide in the infinity of space and 

 time; the violence of the shock is enough to volatilize their matter; 

 the breaking of their envelopes would release the igneous matter so 

 long imprisoned beneath their cooled crusts; like two gigantic shells 

 they "explode" and the endothermic components that their centers 

 contain, held under enormous pressures, set free masses of gas that 

 escape in spiral spirts. Then the stages of which Laplace conceived 

 can begin to follow each other, generating planets; one or two "nuclei" 

 exist in the midst of the nebulous spheres surrounding them; we have 

 watched the resurrection of a world. These collisions are not idle 

 hypotheses, we witness them in the heavens each time that a new 

 star appears, hke the "nova Persei," for example; we have seen a 

 world born, but reborn from a dead world. It is a perpetual cycle 

 that recommences in this manner, a cycle the mechanism of wilich 

 has been pointed out for the first time by the brilUant genius of 

 Arrhenius. 



Such is, too briefly summarized, the Swedish physicist's principle 

 of the theory of cosmogony. But he has not been content w4th 

 explaining the evolution of "cosmic" matter. He has asked him- 

 self — and it is this that will interest the reader of Bielogica more 

 especially — how life could appear on a world thus created; lie lias 

 tried to find out whether living germs, having left a world where they 

 found their conditions of existence realized, can endure the long 

 journey through intersidereal space and bring to another world the 

 germ of hfe which is in themselves, becoming the starting point of a 

 series of living beings brought slowly, by an evolution parallel to 

 that of the planet that sustains them, to gradually increasing degrees 

 of perfection; in a word, to "higher" states. 



Svante Arrhenius answers this question by the elegant, original, 

 and seductive form that he Ixas known how to give to the doctrine 



