DARWIN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 247 



indicated periods of rest between formations, and periods 

 anterior to our so-called first formations, during which the rudi- 

 mentary organs of the early fossils became degraded from their 

 primeval uses. In answer, it is shown that a general physical 

 law obtains, irreconcilable with the persistence of active change 

 at a constant rate ; in any portion of the universe, however 

 large, only a certain capacity for change exists, so that every 

 change which occurs renders the possibility of future change less, 

 and, on the whole, the rapidity or violence of changes tends to 

 diminish. Not only would this law gradually entail in the future 

 the death of all beings and cessation of all change in the plane- 

 tary system, and in the past point to a state of previous violence 

 equally inconsistent with life, if no energy were lost by the 

 system, but this gradual decay from a previous state of violence 

 is rendered far more rapid by the continual loss of energy going 

 on by means of radiation. From this general conception point- 

 ing either to a beginning, or to the equally inconceivable idea of 

 infinite energy in finite materials, we pass to the practical appli- 

 cation of the law to the sun and earth, showing that their 

 present state proves that they cannot remain for ever adapted to 

 living beings, and that living beings can have existed on the 

 earth only for a definite time, since in distant periods the earth 

 must have been in fusion, and the sun must have been mere hot 

 gas, or a group of distant meteors, so as to have been incapable 

 of fulfilling its present functions as the comparatively small 

 centre of the system. From the earth we have no very safe 

 calculation of past time, but the sun gives five hundred million 

 years as the time separating us from a condition inconsistent 

 with life. We next argue that the time occupied in the arrange- 

 ment of the geological formations need not have been longer 

 than is fully consistent with this view, since the gradual dissi- 

 pation of energy must have resulted in a gradual diminution of 

 violence of all kinds, so that calculations of the time occupied 

 by denudations or deposits based on the simple division of the 

 total mass of a deposit, or denudation by the annual action now 

 observed, are fallacious, and that even as the early geologists 

 erred in attempting to compress all action into six thousand 

 years, so later geologists have outstepped all bounds in their 

 figures, by assuming that the world has always gone on much 



