The Story of Evolution | Page 8

vast systems
of stars. Even apart from the evidence that dark nebulae or other special
light-absorbing regions do exist, the question is under discussion in
science at the present moment whether light is not absorbed in the
passage through ordinary space. There is reason to think that it is. Let
us leave precarious speculations about finiteness and infinity to
philosophers, and take the universe as we know it.

Picture, then, on the more moderate estimate, these 500,000,000 suns
scattered over tens of thousands of billions of miles. Whether they form
one stupendous system, and what its structure may be, is too obscure a
subject to be discussed here. Imagine yourself standing at a point from
which you can survey the whole system and see into the depths and
details of it. At one point is a single star (like our sun), billions of miles
from its nearest neighbour, wearing out its solitary life in a portentous
discharge of energy. Commonly the stars are in pairs, turning round a
common centre in periods that may occupy hundreds of days or
hundreds of years. Here and there they are gathered into clusters,
sometimes to the number of thousands in a cluster, travelling together
over the desert of space, or trailing in lines like luminous caravans. All
are rushing headlong at inconceivable speeds. Few are known to be so
sluggish as to run, like our sun, at only 8000 miles an hour. One of the
"fixed" stars of the ancients, the mighty Arcturus, darts along at a rate
of more than 250 miles a second. As they rush, their surfaces glowing
at a temperature anywhere between 1000 and 20,000 degrees C., they
shake the environing space with electric waves from every tiny particle
of their body at a rate of from 400 billion to 800 billion waves a second.
And somewhere round the fringe of one of the smaller suns there is a
little globe, more than a million times smaller than the solitary star it
attends, lost in the blaze of its light, on which human beings find a
home during a short and late chapter of its history.
Look at it again from another aspect. Every colour of the rainbow is
found in the stars. Emerald, azure, ruby, gold, lilac, topaz, fawn--they
shine with wonderful and mysterious beauty. But, whether these more
delicate shades be really in the stars or no, three colours are certainly
found in them. The stars sink from bluish white to yellow, and on to
deep red. The immortal fires of the Greeks are dying. Piercing the
depths with a dull red glow, here and there, are the dying suns; and if
you look closely you will see, flitting like ghosts across the light of
their luminous neighbours, the gaunt frames of dead worlds. Here and
there are vast stretches of loose cosmic dust that seems to be gathering
into embryonic stars; here and there are stars in infancy or in strenuous
youth. You detect all the chief phases of the making of a world in the
forms and fires of these colossal aggregations of matter. Like the
chance crowd on which you may look down in the square of a great

city, they range from the infant to the worn and sinking aged. There is
this difference, however, that the embryos of worlds sprawl, gigantic
and luminous, across the expanse; that the dark and mighty bodies of
the dead rush, like the rest, at twenty or fifty miles a second; and that at
intervals some appalling blaze, that dims even the fearful furnaces of
the living, seems to announce the resurrection of the dead. And there is
this further difference, that, strewn about the intermediate space
between the gigantic spheres, is a mass of cosmic dust--minute grains,
or large blocks, or shoals consisting of myriads of pieces, or
immeasurable clouds of fine gas--that seems to be the rubbish left over
after the making of worlds, or the material gathering for the making of
other worlds.
This is the universe that the nineteenth century discovered and the
twentieth century is interpreting. Before we come to tell the fortunes of
our little earth we have to see how matter is gathered into these
stupendous globes of fire, how they come sometimes to have smaller
bodies circling round them on which living things may appear, how
they supply the heat and light and electricity that the living things need,
and how the story of life on a planet is but a fragment of a larger story.
We have to study the birth and death of worlds, perhaps the most
impressive of all the studies that modern science offers us. Indeed, if
we would read the whole story of evolution, there is an earlier chapter
even than this; the latest chapter to