378 THE WORLD MACHINE 



ceptible in a year than planetary motions in a day, with distances 

 in which the prodigious remoteness of the sun becomes a unit 

 of measure. The perfected telescope is not a century old, the 

 spectroscope is not a half-century, and the application of photo- 

 graphy is hardly a quarter of a century. In another three 

 hundred years we may know a thousand or perhaps ten thou- 

 sand times as much about the stars and the universe they 

 compose as we do now. 



The spectral image and the subtle movement of its cryptic 

 lines have revealed to our wondering ken a considerable number 

 of the stars as tumbling about each other in a sort of rollicking 

 kirmess, furious as the wild romp portrayed by Rubens' ebullient 

 sketch in the Louvre. It would be curious if it should stop 

 here ; it does not. 



The development of our knowledge of binary systems has 

 obviously lent a powerful support to the theory of stellar col- 

 lisions ; and the importance of this is great. We shall see 

 hereafter that our conceptions and theories of stellar evolution 

 and devolution are pivoted upon the reality of this fact. 



It is in no wise probable that the generality of the binary 

 systems came from any binary matrix. We need not conceive 

 them as necessarily evolved from the same nebular mass. Pos- 

 sibly much the larger part of them were as purely the result 

 of chance, let us say, as the appearance of a shooting-star in 

 our atmosphere. In the larger sense there is, to be sure, no 

 chance anywhere. To the infinite eye, did any such exist, the 

 flash of the shoo ting- star, the collision of suns, would all seem 

 as definitely fixed and predictable as the rambles of a roulette 

 ball. We can conceive of no such infinite eye. But in so far 

 as our knowledge is real knowledge, the human mind ap- 

 proaches, though at vast distance, to this infinite intelligence. It 

 may be some hundreds of years, possibly a million, before 

 the human mind attains such heights. Conceivably our orderly 

 little system of planets might be disrupted, or life upon the 

 earth become for one reason and another physically insupport- 

 able, before the mental evolution of the race had proceeded 

 so far. 



In our present ignorance we can only conceive the approach 

 of suns, like that of the molecules of water vapour in the steam 

 chest, as to all intents fortuitous. In the one instance as in 



