INTRODUCTION. XXXI 



recent apocalyptic vision and gigantic prediction of the 

 greater prophets of physics so circumstantially recorded 

 by Professors Tait and Balfour Stewart, in The Unseen 

 Universe; the prediction that the sun will one day, 

 Saturn-like, devour his own offspring, the earth and 

 planets, with their satellites ; that thereafter the nearer 

 suns our own and Sirius, for example " having each 

 long since devoured his attendants," will rush together to 

 absorb each other or reduce themselves to a nebulous 

 vapour in the attempt ; that after an infinite series , of 

 such collisions, after each of which there is a sun or 

 perhaps two suns the less in space, after innumerable 

 deaths (as well too as occasional births) of suns and 

 systems, the final consummation, however long delayed 

 by this disturbing birth-element in the calculation, will 

 be the coalescence of all the matter of all previous suns 

 and systems into one widely diffused matter of uniform 

 temperature, which, as such, can make no fresh attempt 

 at world-generation.* 



I say we may be fairly permitted to doubt this very 

 " big " physical speculation, even without being extreme 

 sceptics with regard to the general scientific creed ; more 

 especially as the first though worst calamity, the fall of 

 our earth upon the sun, is confessedly such a long way 

 off that the unbeliever can never be convinced in the 

 only effectual way by fulfilment or unmistakable 

 tendency to fulfilment of the prophecy* Besides, the 

 supposed finer matter dispersed through space, the uni- 

 versal ether or " resisting medium," whose imperceptible 

 but ceaseless friction in opposition to the earth's motion 

 is the small cause which is to bring about the great 

 catastrophe of the fall of the earth on the sun, this 



* The Unseen Universe, pp. 165, 166 j see also H. Spencer's First 

 Principles, p. 528. 



C 



