262 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 
good throughout all space, but also throughout all 
time, as far as the farthest stretches of space and 
time that science can reveal to us. These are points 
of singular interest, inasmuch as our solar system is 
by no means stationary in the universe. It has long 
been known that our sun is flying through space with 
enormous velocity toward the region which we call 
the constellation Hercules, carrying with him his 
attendant planets with their moons. The revolving 
year, therefore, never brings us back to the place 
where it found us, but to a point many millions of 
miles distant. Is there not something rather thrilling 
in the thought that we are never staying in a familiar 
spot, but always plunging with a speed more than a 
thousand times as great as that of an express train 
through black and silent abysses never before revealed 
to us? Such being the case, it is interesting to be 
assured that no matter how long this continues, we 
may depend upon the beneficent’ uniformity of nature’s 
processes. The mariners of four centuries ago, who 
urged their frail ships down the Senegambian coast 
toward the equator, were sometimes assailed with 
fears lest they should suddenly come into some boil- 
ing sea, where clouds of scalding steam would engulf 
them. But that unification of nature toward which 
modern science has led us quite removes the fear that, 
in the future wanderings of our earthly habitat, we are 
likely to encounter any other conditions than those 
that have prevailed throughout the past. 
The unification of nature in point of time has been 
the work of the nineteenth century and especially of 
its geologists. When it was first proved that the age 
of the earth is not six thousand years, but many mill- 
