EVOLUTION 37 



course, when it was expanded to that immense distance, it 

 must have been very thin indeed, thinner than our clumsy 

 human senses can even conceive of. An American would 

 say, too thin ; but I put Americans out of court at once as 

 mere irreverent scoffers. From the orbit of Neptune, or 

 something outside it, the faint and cloud-like mass which 

 bore within it Caesar and his fortunes, not to mention the 

 remainder of the earth and the solar system, began slowly 

 to converge and gather itself in, growing denser and denser 

 but smaller and smaller as it gradually neared its existing 

 dimensions. How long a time it took to do it is for our 

 present purpose relatively unimportant : the cruel physicists 

 will only let us have a beggarly hundred million years or 

 so for the process, while the grasping and extravagant 

 evolutionary geologists beg with tears for at least double or 

 even ten times that limited period. But at any rate it has 

 taken a good long while, and, as far as most of us are 

 personally concerned, the difference of one or two hundred 

 millions, if it comes to that, is not really at all an appreci- 

 able one. 



As it condensed and lessened towards its central core, 

 revolving rapidly on its great axis, the solar mist left behind 

 at irregular intervals concentric rings or belts of cloud-like 

 matter, cast off from its equator ; which belts, once more 

 undergoing a similar evolution on their own account, have 

 hardened round their private centres of gravity into Jupiter 

 or Saturn, the Earth or Venus. Bound these again, minor 

 belts or rings have sometimes formed, as in Saturn's girdle 

 of petty satellites ; or subsidiary planets, thrown out into 

 space, have circled round their own primaries, as the moon 

 does around this sublunary world of ours. Meanwhile, the 

 main central mass of all, retreating ever inward as it 

 dropped behind it these occasional little reminders of its 

 temporary stoppages, formed at last the sun itself, the 



