The Birth of the Sun and Planbts 11 



CHAPTER II 



The Birth of the Sun and Planets 



The earliest application of the law of evolution to 

 secure a firm groundwork was, we saw, the application 

 to astronomy. At first sight it may seem strange that 

 men should discover the action of the law in bodies that 

 lie millions of miles away from us, or even dwindle into 

 points of light across billions of miles of space, before 

 they were sure of its action in the world immediately 

 about them. But the panorama that evolutionary 

 astronomy now unfolds to us enables us to understand 

 the reason of this singular truth. The animal and plant 

 types that surround us stand out quite distinctly in the 

 economy of nature, and persist unchanged generation 

 after generation. Aristotle and Pliny describe animals 

 just as we know them to-day; the earliest Egyptian 

 inscriptions depict racial types in features that they 

 have in our own time. Experience, apart from the 

 artificial conditions of breeding, seems to be wholly on 

 the side of the unchangeability of species. 



It is entirely different in astronomy. A nebula was 

 said by Laplace to be the ancestor of the sun or star 

 millions of years ago, and no sooner were large telescopes 

 invented than the nebula was discovered to be a reality. 

 Many of the white blotches in the heavens that those 

 early astronomers took to be nebulas did, indeed, prove 

 to be close clusters of stars, but real nebulae were found 

 in abundance. One of the finest, in fact — the nebula in 

 Andromeda — is plainly visible to the naked eye. As 

 instruments improved in power, as the spectroscope 



