The Story of Evolution | Page 9

be opened by science, the first to be
read. We have to ask where the matter, which we are going to gather
into worlds, itself came from; to understand more clearly what is the
relation to it of the forces or energies --gravitation, electricity,
etc.--with which we glibly mould it into worlds, or fashion it into living
things; and, above all, to find out its relation to this mysterious ocean of
ether in which it is found.
Less than half a century ago the making of worlds was, in popular
expositions of science, a comparatively easy business. Take an
indefinite number of atoms of various gases and metals, scatter them in
a fine cloud over some thousands of millions of miles of space, let
gravitation slowly compress the cloud into a globe, its temperature
rising through the compression, let it throw off a ring of matter, which
in turn gravitation will compress into a globe, and you have your earth
circulating round the sun. It is not quite so simple; in any case, serious

men of science wanted to know how these convenient and assorted
atoms happened to be there at all, and what was the real meaning of this
equally convenient gravitation. There was a greater truth than he knew
in the saying of an early physicist, that the atom had the look of a
"manufactured article." It was increasingly felt, as the nineteenth
century wore on, that the atoms had themselves been evolved out of
some simpler material, and that ether might turn out to be the
primordial chaos. There were even those who felt that ether would
prove to be the one source of all matter and energy. And just before the
century closed a light began to shine in those deeper abysses of the
submaterial world, and the foundations of the universe began to appear.

CHAPTER II
. THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE UNIVERSE
To the mind of the vast majority of earlier observers the phrase
"foundations of the universe" would have suggested something
enormously massive and solid. From what we have already seen we are
prepared, on the contrary, to pass from the inconceivably large to the
inconceivably small. Our sun is, as far as our present knowledge goes,
one of modest dimensions. Arcturus and Canopus must be thousands of
times larger than it. Yet our sun is 320,000 times heavier than the earth,
and the earth weighs some 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons. But it
is only in resolving these stupendous masses into their tiniest elements
that we can reach the ultimate realities, or foundations, of the whole.
Modern science rediscovered the atoms of Democritus, analysed the
universe into innumerable swarms of these tiny particles, and then
showed how the infinite variety of things could be built up by their
combinations. For this it was necessary to suppose that the atoms were
not all alike, but belonged to a large number of different classes. From
twenty-six letters of the alphabet we could make millions of different
words. From forty or fifty different "elements" the chemist could
construct the most varied objects in nature, from the frame of a man to
a landscape. But improved methods of research led to the discovery of
new elements, and at last the chemist found that he had seventy or
eighty of these "ultimate realities," each having its own very definite
and very different characters. As it is the experience of science to find

unity underlying variety, this was profoundly unsatisfactory, and the
search began for the great unity which underlay the atoms of matter.
The difficulty of the search may be illustrated by a few figures. Very
delicate methods were invented for calculating the size of the atoms.
Laymen are apt to smile--it is a very foolish smile--at these figures, but
it is enough to say that the independent and even more delicate methods
suggested by recent progress in physics have quite confirmed them.
Take a cubic millimetre of hydrogen. As a millimetre is less than
1/25th of an inch, the reader must imagine a tiny bubble of gas that
would fit comfortably inside the letter "o" as it is printed here. The
various refined methods of the modern physicist show that there are
40,000 billion molecules (each consisting of two atoms of the gas) in
this tiny bubble. It is a little universe, repeating on an infinitesimal
scale the numbers and energies of the stellar universe. These molecules
are not packed together, moreover, but are separated from each other by
spaces which are enormous in proportion to the size of the atoms.
Through these empty spaces the atoms dash at an average speed of
more than a thousand miles an hour, each passing something like
6,000,000,000 of its neighbours in the course of every second. Yet this
particle of gas is a