Evolution of Worlds. 275 



of everything with form. To have form is to live ; to 

 lose it is death. The question thus is, How in the 

 great chemical laboratory of the universe do worlds 

 arise? Out of what are they made? By what pro- 

 cesses have they being ? To what laws are they the 

 slaves and upshot ? 



As already argued, the indestructibility and un- 

 creatability of matter involve the absence of both a 

 be£-innin<T and an end to the fundamental constituents 

 of the universe. The universe in its general details is 

 ever the same — an eternal Now — beginning and end- 

 ing momently in respect to its form and phenomena, 

 but persisting eternally in the substance of these 

 phenomena. Consequently, what the universe was in 

 the past is virtually what It is in the present, a sea of 

 worlds in incessant motion ; hence a knowledge of 

 the infinite vista of the past is practically revealed in 

 the ever-rolling panorama of to-day. 



Meteors and comets have been described as dis- 

 porting in space like fish in the sea, but the analogy 

 may cover the denizens of the whole universe. For 

 space, or the void, is virtually a sea in which disport 

 all material bodies, suns, planets, moons, asteroids, 

 comets, meteors, nebulae, etc. These bodies assume 

 many varied forms. Thus suns may either be child- 

 less or they may govern families infinitely more 

 numerous than the satellites in our own solar system. 

 They may be in all degrees of incandescence, of all 

 sizes compared to our sun, and may live in groups, or 

 revolve round each other like the twin stars. Like 



