ORY MUSEUM

It weighs about 56 lb., and is a "stony" meteorite, i.e., an aerolite.]

Sec. 2

The Beginning of the Earth

When we speak the language of science we cannot say "In the beginning,"
for we do not know of and cannot think of any condition of things that
did not arise from something that went before. But we may qualify the
phrase, and legitimately inquire into the beginning of the earth within
the solar system. If the result of this inquiry is to trace the sun and
the planets back to a nebula we reach only a relative beginning. The
nebula has to be accounted for. And even before matter there may have
been a pre-material world. If we say, as was said long ago, "In the
beginning was Mind," we may be expressing or trying to express a great
truth, but we have gone BEYOND SCIENCE.

The Nebular Hypothesis

One of the grandest pictures that the scientific mind has ever thrown
upon the screen is that of the Nebular Hypothesis. According to
Laplace's famous form of this theory (1796), the solar system was once a
gigantic glowing mass, spinning slowly and uniformly around its centre.
As the incandescent world-cloud of gas cooled and its speed of rotation
increased the shrinking mass gave off a separate whirling ring, which
broke up and gathered together again as the first and most distant
planet. The main mass gave off another ring and another till all the
planets, including the earth, were formed. The central mass persisted as
the sun.

Laplace spoke of his theory, which Kant had anticipated forty-one years
before, with scientific caution: "conjectures which I present with all
the distrust which everything not the result of observation or of
calculation ought to inspire." Subsequent research justified his
distrust, for it has been shown that the original nebula need not have
been hot and need not have been gaseous. Moreover, there are great
difficulties in Laplace's theory of the separation of successive rings
from the main mass, and of the condensation of a whirling gaseous ring
into a planet.

So it has come about that the picture of a hot gaseous nebula revolving
as a unit body has given place to other pictures. Thus Sir Norman
Lockyer pointed out (1890) that the earth is gathering to itself
millions of meteorites every day; this has been going on for millions of
years; in distant ages the accretion may have been vastly more rapid and
voluminous; and so the earth has grown! Now the meteoritic contributi