314 WALKS AND TALKS. 



done? It listened further to the revelation of the star-light. 

 It learned that the same world-stuff pervades the starry spaces 

 and the precincts of our planetary home. Iron is in the 

 stars and bolts the universe together in one inseparable unity. 

 Sodium is there, and hydrogen and other substances which 

 identify the stars and the earth. The very mud in our streets 

 is lighted up in the constellations. Sunlight tells the spectro- 

 scope a fuller tale. It writes the names of twenty elements, 

 at least, with which we have toyed in the laboratory, and un- 

 folds a marvelous story of warring flames and bristling fire- 

 darts streaming a million of miles from the lambent surface 

 of the sphere. 



Thought wandered again across the wild courses of the 

 meteors. They awakened recollections of the iron and stones 

 which have come to the earth ; and of the carbon and hydro- 

 gen and watery vapor which they have brought to us from 

 beyond the planets. These falling stones have come as actual 

 samples out of the store-house of world-stuff. They verify 

 the revelations of the light. They come as slow-traveling mes- 

 sengers to confirm and amplify tidings flashed by telegraph. 

 They proclaim one sort of matter throughout the empire vast 

 as the limits of human vision. 



Next, passed before memory's view, a grand procession of 

 events. Nebulous matter emerged from non-existence, and 

 subjected itself to the workings of gravitation and heat and 

 mechanics, till a succession of worlds rolled out on the plat- 

 form of existence, and I saw myself a circumstance in the 

 midst of the cosmic unfolding. I marveled that the energies 

 of Nature had not been exhausted, or replaced, in the seonic 

 labors which they performed in molding a system of planets 

 and marshaling them in their places. But I find that gravi- 

 tation and heat have worked under the same laws from the 

 beginning to the end. The unity of the physical world is as 

 vast and as wonderful viewed in its historical relations as in 

 its spatial extent. Down through all the cycles through all 

 the burnings and freezings through disruptions and collisions 

 through cataclysms of fire and flood, one hand has steadied 



