38 EVOLUTION 



main luminary of our entire system. Now, I won't deny 

 that this primitive Kantian and Laplacian evolutionism, 

 this nebular theory of such exquisite concinnity, here 

 reduced to its simplest terms and most elementary 

 dimensions, has received many hard knocks from later 

 astronomers, and has been a good deal bowled over, both 

 on mathematical and astronomical grounds, by recent 

 investigators of nebulae and meteors. Observations on 

 comets and on the sun's surface have lately shown that it 

 contains in all likelihood a very considerable fanciful 

 admixture. It isn't more than half true ; and even the 

 half now totters in places. Still, as a vehicle of popular 

 exposition the crude nebular hypothesis in its rawest form 

 serves a great deal better than the- truth, so far as yet 

 known, on the good old Greek principle of the half being 

 often more than the whole. The great point which it im- 

 presses on the mind is the cardinal idea of the sun and 

 planets, with their attendant satellites, not as turned out 

 like manufactured articles, ready made, at measured 

 intervals, in a vast and deliberate celestial Orrery, but as 

 due to the slow and gradual working of natural laws, in 

 accordance with which each has assumed by force of circum- 

 stances its existing place, weight, orbit, and motion. 



The grand conception of a gradual becoming, instead 

 of a sudden making, which Kant and Laplace thus applied 

 to the component bodies of the universe at large, was 

 further applied by Lyell and his school to the outer crust 

 of this one particular petty planet of ours. While the 

 astronomers went in for the evolution of suns, stars, and 

 worlds, Lyell and his geological brethren went in for the 

 evolution of the earth's surface. As theirs was stellar, so 

 his was mundane. If the world began by being a red-hot 

 mass of planetary matter in a high state of internal excite- 

 ment, boiling and dancing with the heat of its emotions, it 



