260 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



As the stars are being formed, the particles ooming together clash, 

 and their arrested motion is transformed into light and heat. The 

 earth we live on, a small satellite of the sun, has lost by radiation 

 much of the heat thus originally caused by its concentration. As it 

 co-oled, its oonstituenits took on forms which did no't exist at its pristine 

 temperature, such as rock, which we call solid, water, which we call 

 fluid, and there were gases left which we call air. Life, 

 then, as now, the i-esult of a ohemical process, took different 

 shapes, crystalline or mineral, vegetable and animal, gradually chang- 

 ing as the surface heat diminished and as their environment required. 

 The slow creation ultimately reached man. While there may be other 

 forms of humanity hereafter evolved, it seems that the cooling of the 

 world is not favourable to rapid change, and the " progress of the race " 

 may be an illusory term. We have not formed any estimate of the 

 age of the sun or the planets. It has been calculated that some fifty 

 million years have elapsed since the earth's surface became solid, but 

 most geologists and students of nature multiply that period by ten. 



The sun, and doubtless the other stars, rotate, as do the planets, 

 some of which have near them smaller planets or moons, also rotating, 

 which circle around them according to the laws of gravity, as they 

 themselves do around the sun, whose heat, still being radiated, is the 

 main-spring of all the life-movements on their surfaces. The forms 

 of the stellar systems are numerous and, to our understanding, compli- 

 cated, stars of both equal and unequal sizes and light-giving powers 

 whirling about each other in periods varying from a few days to hun- 

 dreds of years. 



Thus the views of mankind as to the formation of the universe 

 have themselves been subject to evolution. 



The tenets of many religious beliefs, among them Christianity and 

 Mahommedanism, are dualist, but science is monist; it convinces one 

 of a single Great First cause, one law pervading all space and all time, 

 matter being indestructible though mutable, the law of its existence 

 and of its change enduring from everlastiilg to everlasting — and this 

 we hold, whatever be the nature of matter.^ Science hesitates when 

 the question of soul or spirit is approached. " We cannot give ourselves 

 "soails without giving them to our dogs, perhaps to plants. It is 

 " still clearer that a belief in posthumous existence naturally implies 

 "a belief in pre-existence,*' writes Sir Lesslie Stephen,^ and "why,** 



* Radio-activity, the great discovery of Becquerel, is possibly only the 

 effect of the decay of atoms. Of the construction of atoms from the universal 

 and fundamental diffused material we are still profoundly ignorant. 



' An agnostic's apology. 



