716 ABOUT TEE ATMOSPHERE AND ITS PHENOMENA. 



it is instinct with life, with unceasing and inconceivable forces in constant 

 action reason teaches, and its relations with and obedience to the mighty 

 laws of its planetary family, demonstrate. 



In this light let us examine as to the origin of the atmosphere, as the 

 logic of the formative process would suggest. 



Taking the nebular hypothesis as true, or its modification, the hypothe- 

 sis of nebular aggregation — the same for this purpose — and human reason 

 aided by research has failed to find any other answering to what is known 

 — let us follow the formation of worlds. The telescope reveals to us the 

 cosmic cloud, star dust, which in some stage of development, must be of the 

 material of the worlds. The mathematician has demonstrated that planets 

 must be the result of such masses if rotating on their centres — condensing and 

 giving oif by the radiation of heat, a portion becomes the ball of matter that 

 we inhabit, at the first a liquid globe, with all its matter in a fused and 

 homogeneous condition. The more active radiation consequent on its sep- 

 aration from the general mass caused a crust to form. And this pro- 

 ceeding indefinitely, the elements most eligible for the operation of this 

 • force first becoming solidified, and so through the ages, proceeding by un- 

 changing law. It was impossible in the beginning for life to exist, in any 

 form, for the atmosphere was too intensely heated for its gaseous elements 

 to form compounds, and it must have required ages of this cooling process 

 before even oxygen and hydrogen could unite to form the vapor of water, 

 by which the cooling process was accelerated, from the primeval rains which 

 descended in incessant floods upon the heated mass. 



And this intensifying the process, the action and re-action from the 

 force thus evolved elude all conception in their awful power and sublimity 

 — rending the crust and pulverizing rocks. These waters finally collecting 

 into the depressions and basins formed by these throes of the primeval 

 world, the thermal lakes and seas were formed as we find them in still cooler 

 conditions in the age of man. 



Still cooling, the elevated lands, seamed and scarred, began to be clothed 

 with matter in new forms, and life in its lowest forms a^^peared — the facile 

 elements had solidified into the earth, the obdurate remained as the 

 atmosphere. 



Thus was the world, as we know it, evolved from the original forms and 

 fitted for the uses to v/hich its author had dedicated it in the beginning. 



That this must have been so, let us look out to our neighbors of the solar 

 system and learn of them. We know that the planets possess atmospheres ; 

 we know the sun's atmosphere. The spectroscope tells us of what these are 

 composed. The atmosphere of the sun besides what our own has, is com- 

 posed of what are the solids of our earth, so intensely heated that iron vapor 

 is one of its largest constituents. We, too, had iron in ours. The atmospheres 

 of Venus and Mars appear like our own — for the reason that their size and 

 conditions of mass apj)roximate ours. Jupiter and Saturn have atmospheres 

 so different that it is highly probable these planets possess so high a temper- 



