EVOLUTION 35 



of life, and mind, and matter were still a hopeless and inex- 

 tricable muddle. It was no wonder, then, that the evolution 

 of the heavenly bodies should have been clearly apprehended 

 and definitely formulated while the evolution of the earth's 

 crust was still imperfectly understood, and the evolution of 

 living beings was only tentatively and hypothetically hinted 

 at in a timid whisper. 



In the beginning, say the astronomical evolutionists, 

 not only this world, but all the other worlds in the universe, 

 existed potentially, as the poet justly remarks, in ' a haze of 

 fluid light,' a vast nebula of enormous extent and almost 

 inconceivable material thinness. The world arose out of a 

 sort of primitive world-gruel. The matter of which it was 

 composed was gas, of such an extraordinary and unimagin- 

 able gasiness that millions of cubic miles of it might easily 

 be compressed into a common antibilious pill-box. The 

 pill-box itself, in fact, is the net result of a prolonged 

 secular condensation of myriads of such enormous cubes of 

 this primaeval matter. Slowly setting around common 

 centres, however, in anticipation of Sir Isaac Newton's 

 gravitative theories, the fluid haze gradually collected into 

 suns and stars, whose light and heat is presumably due to 

 the clashing together of their component atoms as they fall 

 perpetually towards the central mass. Just as in a burning 

 candle the impact of the oxygen atoms in the air against 

 the carbon and hydrogen atoms in the melted and rarefied 

 wax or tallow produces the light and heat of the flame, so 

 in nebula or sun the impact of the various gravitating atoms 

 one against the other produces the light and heat by whose 

 aid we are enabled to see and know those distant bodies. 

 The universe, according to this now fashionable nebular 

 theory, began as a single vast ocean of matter of immense 

 tenuity, spread all alike over all space as far as nowhere, 

 and comparatively little different within itself when looked 



D2 



