ASTRONOMY AND COSMIC THEORIES. 107 



what we now see to be an impossible condition that of 

 a universe in a state of vapor. For all matter, in the 

 absence of heat, is solid ; and the only sources of heat we 

 know of are, impact or friction, and chemical combina- 

 tion including electric action. Heat, therefore, in all 

 its degrees and manifestations, will necessarily arise from 

 diffused solid matter subject to gravitation, but it will 

 arise partially and locally, not universally; and we now 

 know that there are such varieties of temperature in the 

 stellar universe. We have also positive evidence of 

 solid matter everywhere, in an almost infinite gradation 

 of size and of temperature, from that amount of cold in 

 which no liquid, and perhaps no gas, can exist, up to 

 that amount of heat in which all the elements are vapor- 

 ized. We can conceive how, from diffused solid matter, 

 without heat, the actual condition of the universe may 

 have arisen; but we cannot conceive any previous condi- 

 tion which would result in the universal vaporization of 

 all matter which the nebular hypothesis presupposes. 



But this grand meteoritic theory, like all possible 

 theories or speculations as to the origin of the cosmos, 

 only takes us one step backward, and then leaves us no 

 whit nearer to a real comprehension of the great insolu- 

 ble problem. For we ask whence came this inconceiv- 

 ably vast extension of meteoritic matter? What was its 

 antecedent state? How did matter, at first presumably 

 simple or atomic, aggregate into those forms we know as 

 elements? And even if we could get back to a universe 

 of primitive atoms, we should still be no nearer a com- 

 plete solution, for then would begin a new series of ques- 

 tions far more difficult to answer. We should begin to 

 seek after the origin of the FORCES which caused the de- 



