The History of Things 73 



tern whose relations of sequence admit of being re- 

 stated by means of equations of motion. Whether 

 we try to interpret the history of the solar system 

 or the genesis of minerals, the origin of a mountain 

 chain or of the granite that helps to compose it, 

 the work of a glacier or the formation of a stalac- 

 tite, we work with reliable formulse of gravita- 

 tion, attraction and repulsion, hydrostatics and 

 thermodynamics, and so on — i. e., with purely 

 mechanical formulae, and we do not find that they 

 are insufficient. If we take the known properties 

 resident in matter and the laws of energy as data, 

 we can plausibly reconstruct any particular part 

 of the inanimate world. *'Gebt mir Materie,^' 

 Kant said, "und ich will daraus eine Welt 

 schaffen." 



Do Things Make Themselves? — When we con- 

 sider these two general results, first, that the be- 

 coming of the earth reads like a story of continu- 

 ous individual development, as of an egg into a 

 chick; and, second, that in our redescription of 

 both the present and the past of any particular 

 part of inanimate nature the categories of me- 

 chanics are sufficient, we get a strong impression 

 that there is much truth in what Kingsley made 

 Nature say in his immortal '' Water-Babies," — 

 "I make things make themselves." 



We look back on the history of inanimate nat- 

 ure and we see obvious complexity arising out of 



