re than a
suggestion that these are the outcome of an inorganic evolution, element
giving rise to element, going back and back to some primeval stuff, from
which they were all originally derived, infinitely long ago. No idea has
been so powerful a tool in the fashioning of New Knowledge as this
simple but profound idea of Evolution, that the present is the child of
the past and the parent of the future. And with the picture of a
continuity of evolution from nebula to social systems comes a promise of
an increasing control--a promise that Man will become not only a more
accurate student, but a more complete master of his world.

It is characteristic of modern science that the whole world is seen to
be more vital than before. Everywhere there has been a passage from the
static to the dynamic. Thus the new revelations of the constitution of
matter, which we owe to the discoveries of men like Professor Sir J. J.
Thomson, Professor Sir Ernest Rutherford, and Professor Frederick Soddy,
have shown the very dust to have a complexity and an activity heretofore
unimagined. Such phrases as "dead" matter and "inert" matter have gone
by the board.

The new theory of the atom amounts almost to a new conception of the
universe. It bids fair to reveal to us many of nature's hidden secrets.
The atom is no longer the indivisible particle of matter it was once
understood to be. We know now that there is an atom within the
atom--that what we thought was elementary can be dissociated and broken
up. The present-day theories of the atom and the constitution of matter
are the outcome of the comparatively recent discovery of such things as
radium, the X-rays, and the wonderful revelations of such instruments as
the spectroscope and other highly perfected scientific instruments.

The advent of the electron theory has thrown a flood of light on what
before was hidden or only dimly guessed at. It has given us a new
conception of the framework of the universe. We are beginning to know
and realise of what matter is made and what electric phenomena mean. We
can glimpse the vast stores of energy locked up in matter. The new
knowledge has much to tell us about the origin and phenomena, not only
of our own planet, but other planets, of the stars, and the sun. New
light is thrown on the source of the sun's heat; we can make more than
guesses as to its probable age. The great question to-day is: is there
_one_ primordial substance from which all the var