14 SCIENCE AND LIFE 



accelerating progress of the spendthrift to destruction, 

 so soon as the inheritance had been squandered and 

 the inevitable day of reckoning arrived. When coal 

 and oil were exhausted, and the daily modicum of 

 sunlight represented once again, as of yore, the 

 whole precarious means of livelihood of the world, the 

 new inanimate servant of science, like the slaves of 

 the ancients, would prove a dangerous helpmate, and 

 the mushroom civilisation it had engendered would 

 dissolve like the historic empires of the past, this 

 time submerging the world. 



No one had guessed the truth, though geological 

 records tell of a history, vastly longer than human, 

 during which, without much change, certainly without 

 any evidence of progressive exhaustion, the energy of 

 the sun had been invigorating and quickening the 

 world. The fixed stars overhead, shining without 

 apparent change of splendour throughout the past 

 ages so far back as human memory extends, speak of 

 a continuous outpouring of energy which, making all 

 allowance for the vast scale of cosmical events, 

 possesses a character of permanence and endurance 

 foreign to the processes and events which hitherto 

 had come within the ken of science. No one had 

 guessed the original source of the stream of energy 

 which rejuvenates the universe, nor that it has its 

 rise, not in the unfathomable immensities of space, 

 but in the individual atoms of matter all around. In 

 so far as it is dominated by the supply of available 

 energy, the limits of the possible expansion and 

 development of the race in the future have been 

 virtually abolished by this discovery of the immanence 

 of the physical sources of life and motion in the 

 universe. 



Painfully and with infinite slowness man has 

 crawled to the elevation from which he can envisage 

 his eventful past as a whole from one standpoint, as 



