ic 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