4o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



electricity and who can not discover anything mysterious about the 

 operations on the floor of a business exchange is in need of a mental 

 shaking. 



It is useless for us to attempt to answer such questions as, what is 

 electricity? Or, what is a conscious being? Or, what is hydrogen? 

 We can only answer such questions in unknown terms. But we have 

 learned much about all of these things. Whether we consider matter 

 in the minutest details of its structure or in the larger fields into which 

 the telescope and the spectroscope have led us, we find the same array 

 of wonders. How many of those who talk to us of the work of the 

 Creator have the faintest idea of what those words mean? Have all 

 of these electrons, and atoms and molecules and worlds and stars and 

 stellar systems been created ? 



We are dependent on molecular vibrations on the sun for the con- 

 ditions which make life possible. That heat energy which we receive 

 from our sun will finally fail. The sun will become cold. The earth 

 will freeze. Our atmosphere will become liquid and finally solid. The 

 stars are also going through the same history. Their heat is also being 

 continually radiated into space. The operation is like that of a clock 

 which has been wound up and is running down. There must have been 

 a beginning, and there will be an end, in cold and universal night. 

 Now and then two dead stars may collide and vaporize into a nebula. 

 This nebula may finally become a planetary system which may become 

 the habitation of conscious beings; but it will go through the same 

 history. And the number of bodies capable of colliding and forming 

 world systems will have been reduced by one. To be sure, the probabil- 

 ity of the occurrence of such collision happening during a given time 

 interval will diminish continually, but there will evidently be an end 

 of the present order of things. The results of recent work on the 

 phenomena of radioactive bodies make it probable that the beginning of 

 life on this earth may be much farther back in time than was formerly 

 supposed. The heat which has been radiated from our earth has been in 

 part supplied by the energy of these atomic explosions. It may be tbat 

 the temperature of our sun may be thus maintained for a longer time 

 than was formerly thought possible. But such considerations do not in 

 any way change our ideas concerning the nature of the operations 

 which are going on. Here also, in these radioactive bodies we find a 

 store of energy which is being continually drawn upon. It is manifest- 

 ing itself finally as heat which is being continually radiated into space. 

 It may be that we must place a higher estimate than was formerly 

 thought necessary upon the vast store of energy which the visible uni- 

 verses of to-day have possessed in the remote past. It may be that the 

 work of creation was greater than we have supposed. It may be that the 

 end is more remote than we now think. But even if we assent to the 



