THE GENESIS OP THE EARTH. 11 



and farther from tlie centre of tlie system, it came on 

 earlier, and has long since passed away. This was 

 the glorious starlike condition of our globe : in a 

 physical point of view, its most perfect and beautiful 

 state, when, if there were astronomers with telescopes 

 in the stars, they might have seen our now dull 

 earth flash forth — a brilliant white star secondary to 

 the sun. 



But in process of time this passes away. All the 

 more solid and less volatile substances are condensed 

 and precipitated ; and now the atmosphere, still vast 

 in bulk, and dark and misty in texture, contains only 

 the water, chlorine, carbonic acid, sulphuric acid, and 

 other more volatile substances ; and as these gather in 

 dense clouds at the outer surface, and pour in fierce 

 corrosive rains upon the heated nucleus, combining 

 with its materials, or flashing again into vapour, dark- 

 ness dense and gross settles upon the vaporous deep, 

 and continues for long ages, until the atmosphere is 

 finally cleared of its acid vapours and its superfluous 

 waters.* In the meantime, radiation, and the heat 

 abstracted from the liquid nucleus by the showers 

 of condensing material from the atmosphere, have 

 so far cooled its surface that a crust of slag or cinder 

 forms upon it. Broken again and again by the heav- 

 ings of the ocean of fire, it at length sets permanently, 

 and receives upon its bare and blistered surface the 

 ever-increasing aqueous and acid rain thrown down 



* Hunt, " Chemistry of the Primeval Earth," Silliman'a 

 Journal, 1858. 



