EVOLUTION 3

EVOLUTION 3

In the beginning, say the astronomical evolutionists, not only this
world, but all the other worlds in the universe, existed potentially, as
the poet justly remarks, in 'a haze of fluid light,' a vast nebula of
enormous extent and almost inconceivable material thinness. The world
arose out of a sort of primitive world-gruel. The matter of which it was
composed was gas, of such an extraordinary and unimaginable gasiness
that millions of cubic miles of it might easily be compressed into a
common antibilious pill-box. The pill-box itself, in fact, is the net
result of a prolonged secular condensation of myriads of such enormous
cubes of this primæval matter. Slowly setting around common centres,
however, in anticipation of Sir Isaac Newton's gravitative theories, the
fluid haze gradually collected into suns and stars, whose light and heat
is presumably due to the clashing together of their component atoms as
they fall perpetually towards the central mass. Just as in a burning
candle the impact of the oxygen atoms in the air against the carbon and
hydrogen atoms in the melted and rarefied wax or tallow produces the
light and heat of the flame, so in nebula or sun the impact of the
various gravitating atoms one against the other produces the light and
heat by whose aid we are enabled to see and know those distant bodies.
The universe, according to this now fashionable nebular theory, began as
a single vast ocean of matter of immense tenuity, spread all alike over
all space as far as nowhere, and comparatively little different within
itself when looked at side by side with its own final historical
outcome. In Mr. Spencer's perspicuous phrase, evolution in this aspect
is a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the
incoherent to the coherent, and from the indefinite to the definite
condition. Difficult words at first to apprehend, no doubt, and
therefore to many people, as to Mr. Matthew Arnold, very repellent, but
full of meaning, lucidity, and suggestiveness, if only we once take the
trouble fairly and squarely to understand them.

Every sun and every star thus formed is for ever gathering in the hem of
its outer robe upon itself, for ever radiating off its light and heat
into surrounding space, and for ever growing denser and colder as it
sets slowly towards its centre of gravity. Our own sun and solar system
may be taken as good typical working examples of how the stars thus
constantly shrink into smaller and ever smaller dimensions around their
own fixed centre. Naturally, we know more about our own solar system
than about any other in our own universe, and it also possesses for us a
greater practical and personal interest than any outside portion of the
galaxy. Nobody can pretend to be profoundly immersed in the internal
affairs of Sirius or of Alpha Centauri. A fiery revolution in the belt
of Orion would affect us less than a passing finger-ache in a certain
single terrestrial baby of our own household. Therefore I shall not
apologise in any way for leaving the remainder of the sidereal universe
to its unknown fate, and concentrating my attention mainly on the
affairs of that solitary little, out-of-the-way, second-rate system,
whereof we form an inappreciable portion. The matter which now composes
the sun and its attendant bodies (the satellites included) was once
spread out, according to Laplace, to at least the furthest orbit of the
outermost planet--that is to say, so far as our present knowledge goes,
the planet Neptune. Of course, when it was expanded to that immense
distance, it must have been very thin indeed, thinner than our clumsy
human senses can even conceive of. An American would say, too thin; but
I put Americans out of court at once as mere irreverent scoffers. From
the orbit of Neptune, or something outside it, the faint and cloud-like
mass which bore within it Cæsar and his fortunes, not to mention the
remainder of the earth and the solar system, began slowly to converge
and gather itself in, growing denser and denser but smaller and smaller
as it gradually neared its existing dimensions. How long a time it took
to do it is for our present purpose relatively unimportant: the cruel
physicists will only let us have a beggarly hundred million years or so
for the process, while the grasping and extravagant evolutionary
geologists beg with tears for at least double or even ten times that
limited period. But at any rate it has taken a good long while, and, as
far as most of us are personally concerned, the difference of one or two
hundred millions, if it comes to that, is not really at all an
appreciable one.