JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 83 
CHEMISTRY OF CREATION. 
Read before the Astronomical Section of the Hamilton Scientific Assoctatzon, 
Feb. 4th, 1902. 
BY J. M. WILLIAMS. 
t will be thought a somewhat presumptuous title that has been 
taken for this paper. Will one assume that he can take the universe 
into the laboratory ; will one say that he shall separate in the work- 
shop matter from matter so that the tremendous works of nature 
shall lie piecemeal on the study table? Scarcely. It may be that 
its alliterative form may have written it. Still, while one may not 
say that he will melt a planet or diffuse a star, yet he may, with the 
faculty of imaginative reason, sort and separate each from each, 
atom from atom, until there lies before us the analysis of a world. 
If then a world, then a universe. Creation to us is a subject which 
takes its rise with a basis of belief in the importance of our earth as 
the principal factor, with the stars and the solar system as mere ad- 
juncts for our benefit. When the light of knowledge opens the field 
of vision, how faith shrinks and hope almost dies. Shall man stop 
here amid the wreckage of his early lessons? No; but with the 
greatness of the human mind to grasp and grapple with the unthought 
and unknown, given to use, designed to learn, he shall, on the very 
ground built of the ashes of error, unravel, unravel, unravel. That 
which we call the solid earth, in figures of poetic speech we say 
‘firm as the everlasting hills,” “firm as the earth on which we stand ;” 
this, in the hands of chemistry, disperses back to the evanescent air, 
and that which is solid proves but a vapor. Ere time was counted by 
the course of suns, ere space knew the system of our orbit’s course, 
our sun, whirling on its track alone, ringed with a coronet of glory, 
stirred by the finger of God, to revolve, until, cooling to a nucleus, 
there gathered stratum upon stratum, till earths were builded and 
planets grew. 
In this constructive stage operated the action of heat becoming 
