of our modern
evolutionism. Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were the Joshuas who
led the chosen people into the land which more than one venturous Moses
had already dimly descried afar off from the Pisgah top of the
eighteenth century.

Kant and Laplace came first in time, as astronomy comes first in logical
order. Stars and suns, and planets and satellites, necessarily precede
in development plants and animals. You can have no cabbages without a
world to grow them in. The science of the stars was therefore reduced to
comparative system and order, while the sciences of life, and mind, and
matter were still a hopeless and inextricable muddle. It was no wonder,
then, that the evolution of the heavenly bodies should have been clearly
apprehended and definitely formulated while the evolution of the earth's
crust was still imperfectly understood, and the evolution of living
beings was only tentatively and hypothetically hinted at in a timid
whisper.

In the beginning, say the astronomical evolutionists, not only this
world, but all the other worlds in the universe, existed potentially, as
the poet justly remarks, in 'a haze of fluid light,' a vast nebula of
enormous extent and almost inconceivable material thinness. The world
arose out of a sort of primitive world-gruel. The matter of which it was
composed was gas, of such an extraordinary and unimaginable gasiness
that millions of cubic miles of it might easily be compressed into a
common antibilious pill-box. The pill-box itself, in fact, is the net
result of a prolonged secular condensation of myriads of such enormous
cubes of this primaeval matter. Slowly setting around common centres,
however, in anticipation of Sir Isaac Newton's gravitative theories, the
fluid haze gradually collected into suns and stars, whose light and heat
is presumably due to the clashing together of their component atoms as
they fall perpetually towards the central mass. Just as in a burning
candle the impact of the oxygen atoms in the air against the carbon and
hydrogen atoms in the melted and rarefied wax or tallow produces the
light and heat of the flame, so in nebula or sun the impact of the
various gravitating atoms one against the other produces the light and
heat by whose aid we are enabled to see and know those distant bodies.
The universe, according to this now fashionable nebular theory, began as
a single vast ocean of matter of immense tenuity, spread all alike over
all space as