The Story of Evolution | Page 8

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 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