A Forecast of the End 115 



CHAPTER VIII 



A POREOAST OP THE END 



The reader will be disposed to pause here for a 

 moment in our breathless race through the avenues of 

 time and sum up our discoveries. We have in the 

 preceding five chapters covered a period of development 

 that may well have occupied a thousand million years or 

 more. That we have done so very superficially is no 

 reproach to so slight an essay as this. It has been 

 sought only to trace the broad lines of the evolution of 

 our world and its inhabitants. Almost each page of this 

 essay could be expanded into a volume with the aid of 

 the many sciences that co-operate in piecing the story 

 together. But there is a discipline and a certain fund of 

 instruction in making this swift and general survey of 

 the entire panorama. We enlarge the mental frame in 

 which we may set the various particular studies that 

 may occupy our closer attention. We get a fine sense 

 of perspective, in more matters than scientific study. 



So far we have passed rapidly along the series of 

 changes that have led up to our own appearance. In a 

 vast universe, in which countless worlds are growing and 

 dying, just like the million inhabitants of a great city, we 

 single out a widely diffused cloud of matter that is 

 beginning to condense into our solar system. We see it 

 fling out its fiery arms or fragments, and then gather 

 into the great incandescent ball of the sun. We see 

 one of these cast-off arms or masses, weighing 6,000 

 million billion tons, round slowly into a smaller incan- 

 descent ball, cool down, and form a hard crust round 



