remaining constant, the form of these bodies depends upon the temperature. Every one knows that the same is true of sulphur, and zinc, and several other substances. Science has succeeded in changing the form of numerous bodies usually regarded as extremely refractory. Copper, gold, platinum, and the other metals may be readily fused. The same is true of many rocks and minerals. On the other hand, several gases have been liquefied, and some, like carbonic acid, have even been reduced to the solid state. It would seem that, if the appliances of science were as effective as those which we know that Nature wields, every recognized substance might be changed at pleasure into a solid, a liquid, or a gas. What, indeed, are we to learn from the ejection of melted rocks, in the form of lava, from the throats of volcanoes? Must we not conclude that somewhere within is a reservoir in which all things are melted tegether? And what is to forbid our assuming that the history of matter has proceeded, from the remotest epoch to which we can climb, by the chain of cause and effect? What hinders us from mounting beyond the molten to the gaseous state of the world? We will do it. We venture to gaze upon a world glowing as an immensity of flame. Matter it must be, but matter in its most attenuated condition. Its preeminent characteristic is luminosity. It is primeval light. But the history of this terrestrial vapor involves the history of the other planets. Geology has become cosmogony. We behold the matter of the solar system-sun, planets, and satellites—but one vast ocean of ignited materials, swung by Omnipotence in mid-space, with other oceans of flaming matter gleaming on it, from every direction, across the cold intervals of infinite space.* * A period anterior to any definite arrangement of the materials of the earth seems to be mentioned in Gen. i., 1, 2: "In the beginning God A B Fig. 11. Comparative volume of the earth in the gaseous and solid state. A. The earth in its present condition. B. The volume of the earth when an igneous vapor. We dare go no farther; we can go no farther. If science leads us here, she deserts us at this point, and leaves created the heaven and the earth; and the earth was without form, and void." These interesting utterances will be further considered in another work. A primordial condition of things seems to have been a favorite conception of the ancient philosophers and poets. What a consistent picture is given by Ovid in the "Metamorphoses:" "Ante, mare et tellus, et quod tegit omnia cœlum, Unus erat toto Naturæ vultus in orbe, Quem dixere chaos; rudis indigestaque moles; Nec quidquam, nisi pondus iners; congestaque eodem us to lean only on the arm of Omnipotence. Beyond is only God. No man can predicate an anterior condition of cosmical matter. This condition is necessarily primordial. As matter could not have remained in such a condition-as it did not remain in such a condition-the career of matter must have had a commencement. Its evolutions are not from eternity. As its earliest existence involves an evanescent condition, the existence of matter had a commencement. It began to exist only when it began to change. Matter, viewed in the light of physical laws. alone, can not be pronounced eternal. Matter is the ef fect of an efficient cause whose existence is antecedent to matter. As philosophy utters this verdict, how harmoniously rise the voices of the soul, declaring in the face of Atheism that nothing exists except as an effect-demanding that matter itself be remanded to the causation of a creator. And as matter proclaims a First Cause, having existence in itself, as the first link of the long chain of events, so the soul of man reveals an intuition of that First Cause, and rests satisfied in attributing self-existence to a Supreme Intelligence, while impelled to deny it to every thing else. The beginning of this history does not stretch, therefore, into the inscrutable eternities. We discover the firm Rock of support from which the chain of existence hangs. It is the "Rock of Ages." We feel comforted and strengthened in knowing that "in the beginning God created.” We assert, then, that evidence exists that the solar system came from the hand of the Creator in the state of igneous vapor. Nor does the assertion predicate a condition of cosmical matter that is not, even to this day, exemplified in the universe. Is not the sun a globe of fire-cloud, with a nucleus of molten minerals? And does not the spectroscope declare the composition of the sun to be identical with that of the earth? And what is the substance of the filmy comet that sweeps with such indecent haste through the ranks of the dignified sisterhood of planets? In its dazzling proximity to the sun at perihelion, it can only exist as a fiery vapor, like the substance it seems to be. And if we gaze across the cold and starless interval which separates our firmament of stars from its nearest neighbors, there we may witness a universe in its formative stage. There, indeed, are firmaments so remote that the eye of the telescope is strained in the attempt to descry the component stars; but nearer to our domestic earth than these are the materials of firmaments which remain "rudis indigestaque moles"-the "semina rerum"-the primordial igneous vapor from which worlds are destined to be formed in some far distant future age-so distant, probably, that the career of terrestrial things will first have closed, and mankind will have been ushered into another state of being. Here are specimen creations, postponed to our age in the lapse of eternity, to illustrate before our eyes the infancy of the firmament which is garnished by the nightly splendors of Sirius and Orion. As the gar-pike among animal creations has been perpetuated to our day, to recite the tale of his noble ancestry, so the Pentacrinus of the Caribbean still lives to declare the history of pre-Adamite creatures, whose mausoleum is a continent, and the ruins of whose handiwork have risen in mountain piles. In our attempt to depict the history of this immensity of flame, we draw upon the splendid deductions of Laplace, endorsed by the genius of the elder Herschel, and first foreshadowed by the genius of Leibnitz and Kant. There is every reason to believe that the radiation of heat, which is taking place from the earth and all the planets as well as the sun himself in our own day, is a process which began on the morning of the creation of matter. The rapid loss of heat which the cosmical vapor experienced produced a rapid contraction in volume. Every particle upon the periphery and through the interior began to move toward the centre of gravity of the mass. It is barely possible that a process of cooling and contraction should proceed. in such a mass until the work should be completed and no rotary motion be generated. Such a result has, however, in the existing universe, an infinity of chances against it. There were always other masses of matter within our firmament, and others far beyond its limits, which exerted an attraction upon the mass from which our solar system was to be engendered. If Sirius, and Capella, and Vega, and all the other fixed stars, or any of them, be suns like our own, with retinues of encircling planets, their history must be analogous to that of our own system, and we are to regard them as hanging on the verge of the firmament when our system was in its earliest infancy. Their attractive influences were felt. The cosmical vapor which might otherwise have been perfectly spherical became distorted. in its form. The position of the centre of gravity was changed. The atoms, in their progress toward the centre of gravity, were found upon lines passing to one side of the centre of gravity. Each began to exert a tangential force. The resultant was a tangential force. It was as if a power had been applied at the surface to inaugurate a rotation of the mass. A rotation once inaugurated in a shrinking globe of matter, it is demonstrable that it would continue to be accelerated as long as the mass should continue to contract. In the present case the mass assumed the form of a greatly flattened spheroid, and the velocity of the peripheral portion became so great as to overcome the power of gravity. As a consequence, the peripheral portion became detached in the form of a ring—as water is thrown from a rapidly revolving grindstone. The ring continued |