president’s address. 
491 
moth whose existence is but that of the summer day; or else it 
may suggest that there is no purpose whatever in the universe, 
and that the atoms do nothing but continuously arrange and re- 
arrange themselves in new forms and shapes and conditions and 
affinities as do the clouds in the sky. You may recall Shelley’s 
poem in which he describes the cloud, (the nursling of the sky, 
passing through the pores of the ocean and 'shores, changing but 
never dying, so that when the pavilion of heaven is bare the 
atoms of which it is composed come from the caverns of rain, 
from the earth and water, into which they had receded and build 
up in the blue dome of air the cloud’s own cenotaph, and having 
done 'this these atoms in the ever changing state of things as 
quickly unbuild it again. This might be a poetically descriptive 
picture of the changing portions of 'the universe, a presentation 
in our atmosphere in a short 'hour of what is done in myriads of 
years in the creation and dissolution of worlds in the infinity of 
space. But you may say that (this is fanciful rather than exact. 
In his address before the British Association at its meeting in 
South Africa last August, Prof. Darwin, the President, intimated 
his belief that the stars have a life history, they pass in order 
from youth to age; the inexorable sweep of time is operative 
upon them as upon fragile human bodies ; like human bodies, al- 
though at an indefinitely slower rate, they grow, they attain 
maturity and decline. But to say this reveals us nothing. “A 
real beginning of creation evades our keenest scrutiny of material 
things and their relations,” says a writer in a recent issue of the 
Monthly Review. So long as man shall last, says Prof. Darwin, 
“he will pursue his search into the intricacies of nature and will 
no doubt discover many wonderful things, which are still hidden. 
We may indeed be amazed at all that man has found out but the 
immeasurable magnitude of the undiscovered, will, throughout 
all time, remain to humble his pride. Our children’s children will 
still be gazing and marvelling at the starry heavens 1 but the riddle 
will be never read.” 
At tlie close of 1905 this is the last word of oosmical science. 
We know or we think we know that the Pleiades were formerly 
a nebulous formation in which there were no stars, that they 
will in the future become a stellar system freed from the frag- 
