1908-9. | A NEBULAR THEORY OF CREATION. 451 
A NEBULAR THEORY OF CREATION. 
By (Gy, Gy Pursey: 
(Read 21st March, 1908). 
THE subject which I have presumed to take up and discuss for a little 
while this evening is of far reaching scope, and almost bewildering mag- 
nitude. Nothing less than the formation, preparation, and equipment 
of a world to give birth and sustenance to teeming millions of life forms, 
conceived in its secret chambers, and nourished on its broad bosom through 
unnumbered ages. A work, or process, requiring a period of time of in- 
calculable duration, reckoned, if it can be reckoned at all, by thousands 
of millions of our little years. 
I shall have occasion perhaps in tracing the antenatal history of the 
earth as it may be called—to go back of Laplace or any others, so far as I 
ail aware, who have ventured upon this absorbing field of speculative 
science. 
Before entering into the subject proper, I wish to state a few general 
principles to prepare the ground for what follows, and remove the need 
for explanations as I proceed. Matter, we must postulate, worlds cannot 
be made without it, and there is any amount ready to hand. How, or 
when matter came into existence must remain an unsolved problem. But 
of the changes which matter undergoes, and of its adaptability to be 
moulded into infinite forms, we do know a little, but of the law of forms, 
we must acknowledge that we know almost nothing, and it has been said 
that ‘‘we have no doctrine of forms in our Philosophy.”’ j 
Experience has taught us that all forms are unstable, that no material 
form endures, and so far as we know, this law is written upon everything 
we see in the physical world. And further, science has all but demonstrat- 
ed that the entire universe is made of one stuff. Hence we infer it will be 
subject to and controlled by somewhat similar general-laws, though it 
may be under infinitely diverse conditions. And so we find running through 
all the kingdoms of nature, birth—or a beginning corresponding to birth, 
growth, maturity, gestation, parturition, or procreation, decay, death, 
and dissolution. This appears to be the common lot of all mundane 
things, and throughout the life history of animal, vegetable or mineral 
