CHAPTER IV. THE SOLAR SYSTEM IN A BLAZE. "HAVING made a reconnoissance of the vast field which lies before the geological observer, let us ascertain what degree of interest may be derived from a more attentive survey. The ordeal by fire stands first in the order of time. We go back, then, to the molten period of the earth. We plunge into the depths of the past eternity, and behold the terrestial globe glowing with a fervent heat. What a history to trace from that point of time to this! Continents clothed with verdure, and diversified with mountain, hill, and dale-continents spread out upon a thousand courses of solid masonry-are to be derived from this germinal, incandescent mass. It requires an unusual effort of the imagination to leap from the scenes of a modern landscape to an adequate conception of a naked, tenantless, and molten orb, enveloped in an atmosphere of deadly elements, and totally unlike the present earth save in its spherical form and its yearly journey round the sun. To the eye of imagination, the forests must vanish in smoke; the "cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces" of man must crumble to clay, and sand, and loam; man and all living things must desert the earth, and leave it in the motionless and stagnant silence of death; the rivers must dry up in their channels; the ocean must change to vapor, and flee to the upper limits of the air; the rockribbed mountains must yield to the melting touch of fire; and the rigid crust of the earth must dissolve into a yielding and obedient fluid. Can we place ourselves in view of the scenes which then existed? Creation is in its incipient stages. The long line of events, which is to end in the installation of man in possession of the earth, lies before us. Methods and plans are now to be adopted whose carrying out is to be extended into the distant future, and which shall comprehend and provide for the endless variety of exigencies which are to grow out of the gradual development of the destined order of things. How inadequate would be a human intelligence to an occasion like this! But to the mind of the Infinite Intelligence the whole creation already existed, and not a feature of the original plan has been abandoned in the long process of its actualization. But whence the state of things which we are proposing to picture? Was this the "beginning?" In truth, we are forced to admit that science authorizes us to predicate a molten condition of the globe as the consequent of a vaporous one. What are the states of matter but the product of temperature and pressure? We style the liquid the natural state of water, because that is its ordinary condition under our own eyes. But where the mean temperature is below the freezing-point, the solid is its ordinary state; and where the mean temperature rises above the boiling-point, the gaseous is its ordinary state. To men who exist (if such there are) where the climatic temperature never rises to the thawing-point, water is known only as ice; it is quarried as a rock; it may be built into temples, or fortifications, or used for sidewalks. Could man exist, on the contrary, where the climatic temperature never falls below the boiling-point of water, this substance would only be known as a gas, like hydrogen or carbonic acid. There are regions where water, and even mercury, maintain the permanent condition of solids. gions where they can exist only as vapor. There are re The pressure 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 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 ( |