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 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 inconcei