EVOLUTION 39 



gradually cooled down with age and experience, for growing 

 old is growing cold, as every one of us in time, alas, dis- 

 covers. As it passed from its fiery and volcanic youth to 

 its staider and soberer middle age, a solid crust began to 

 form in filmy fashion upon its cooling surface. The aqueous 

 vapour that had floated at first as steam around its heated 

 mass condensed with time into a wide ocean over the now 

 hardened shell. Gradually this ocean shifted its bulk into 

 two or three main bodies that sank into hollows of the 

 viscid crust, the precursors of Atlantic, Pacific, and the 

 Indian Seas. Wrinklings of the crust, produced by the 

 cooling and consequent contraction, gave rise at first to 

 baby mountain ranges, and afterwards to the earliest rough 

 draughts of the still- very vague and sketchy continents. 

 The world grew daily more complex and more diverse ; it 

 progressed, in accordance with the Spencerian law, from 

 the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and so forth, as 

 aforesaid, with delightful regularity. 



At last, by long and graduated changes, seas and lands, 

 peninsulas and islands, lakes and rivers, hills and mountains, 

 were wrought out by internal or external energies on the 

 crust thus generally fashioned. Evaporation from the 

 oceans gave rise to clouds and rain and hailstorms ; the 

 water that fell upon the mountain tops cut out the valleys 

 and river basins ; rills gathered into brooks, brooks into 

 streams, streams into primaeval Niles, and Amazons, and 

 Mississippis. Volcanic forces uplifted here an Alpine chain, 

 or depressed there a deep-sea hollow. Sediment washed 

 from the hills and plains, or formed from countless skeletons 

 of marine creatures, gathered on the sinking bed of the 

 ocean as soft ooze, or crumbling sand, or thick mud, or 

 gravel and conglomerate. Now upheaved into an elevated 

 table-land, now slowly carved again by rain and rill into 

 valley and watershed, and now worn down once more into 



