GEOLOGY. 129 



the impregnation of the ovum all the organs of the future 

 embryo are determined, although they first develop them- 

 selves gradually. The same agent, which creates the air 

 solicits also its two principles unto combustion in the 

 water; and the same act, which separates the oxygen 

 gas out of the air as water, separates also the carbon 

 from it to constitute earth. Not one can be posited, with- 

 out the other being codetermined. 



578. The analysing principle cannot be a something 

 internal residing in the planet itself. But all that it 

 is, it is through antagonism with the sun. This an- 

 tagonism is light. This it is that divorces or separates 

 the elements from their matrix; it is light, which has 

 sundered the aether into the twofold air, and the air 

 again into the denser elements, water and earth, sepa- 

 rating the oxygen from the nitrogen and later on from 

 the carbon, which must be taken up in water as an 

 oxide. 



579. At the commencement of the separation the fluid 

 must be the first to emerge, because the cohesion or 

 fixation of the poles is possible only in a successive manner, 

 yet not as if water were according to its determination to 

 be the first and the Earthy the second in the order of 

 production. As the oxygen separated from the air to 

 create water, so also must the carbon that was left have 

 been precipitated from the water and metamorphosed into 

 earth. Thence and thence only may we venture to say, 

 that the earths originated out of water ; for, properly 

 speaking, they arose as absolutely for themselves as air 

 and water ; but as air succeeded aether, and water air, 

 so did the earth the water. 



580 Whatever be the bulk of the mass of water, to 

 the same extent is the Earthy, or the germ of the Earthy, 

 diffused throughout it. The whole is a fluid mass of 

 earth. Light, however, penetrates the mass of water as 

 a transparent body. As translucency is not a mechanical 

 but a dynamic act, or process of different! alization in 

 matter ; so does this earth- water become separated into 

 a mass of oxygen and carbon, or into ordinary water and 

 into the earth -element. 9 



