lO WORLD-MAKING 



Stationary, or merely revolving on their own axes. It was a 

 " horror of great darkness," and I trembled with fear. "This," 

 said my guide, "is what the old Hebrew seer called tohu ve 

 bohu, ' formless and void,' the ' Tiamat ' or abyss of the old 

 Chaldeans, the * chaos and old night ' of the Greeks. Your 

 mundane physicists have not seen it, but they speculate re- 

 garding it, and occupy themselves with questions as to whether 

 it can be lightened and vivified by mere attractive force, or by 

 collision of dark bodies impinging on each other with vast 

 momentum. Their speculations are vain, and lead to nothing, 

 because they have no data wherefrom to calculate the in- 

 finite and eternal Power who determined either the attraction 

 or the motion, or who willed which portion of this chaos 

 was to become cosmos, and which was to remain for ever 

 dead and dark. Let us turn, however, to a more hopeful 

 prospect." We sped away to another scene. Here were 

 vast luminous bodies, such as we call nebulae. Some were 

 globular, others disc-like, others annular or like spiral wisps, 

 and some were composed of several concentric shells or rings. 

 All were in rapid rotation, and presented a glorious and bril- 

 liant spectacle. " This," said my guide, " is matter of the same 

 kind with that we have just been, considering ; but it has been 

 set in active motion. The fiat ' Let there be light ! ' has been 

 issued to it. Nor is its motion in vain. Each of these ne- 

 bulous masses is the material of a system of worlds, and they 

 will produce systems of different forms in accordance with the 

 various shapes and motions which you observe. Such bodies 

 are well known to earthly astronomers. One of them, the great 

 nebula of Andromeda, has been photographed, and is a vast 

 system of luminous rings of vapour placed nearly edgewise to 

 the earth, and hundreds of times greater than the whole solar 

 system. But now let us annihilate time, and consider these 

 gigantic bodies as they will be in the course of many millions 

 of years." Instantaneously these vast nebulae had concentrated 



