heavier atoms to gravitate more
and more towards the centre.
The seventh impulse sent out from the Third Aspect of the Deity does not,
as before, draw back the physical atoms which were last made into the
original dissociated bubbles, but draws them together into certain
aggregations, thus making a number of different kinds of what may be called
proto-elements, and these again are joined together into the various forms
which are known to science as chemical elements. The making of these
extends over a long period of ages, and they are made in a certain definite
order by the interaction of several forces, as is correctly indicated in
Sir William Crookes's paper, _The Genesis of the Elements_. Indeed the
process of their making is not even now concluded; uranium is the latest
and heaviest element so far as we know, but others still more complicated
may perhaps be produced in the future.
As ages rolled on the condensation increased, and presently the stage of a
vast glowing nebula was reached. As it cooled, still rapidly rotating, it
flattened into a huge disc and gradually broke up into rings surrounding a
central body--an arrangement not unlike that which Saturn exhibits at the
present day, though on a far larger scale. As the time drew near when the
planets would be required for the purposes of evolution, the Deity sets up
somewhere in the thickness of each ring a subsidiary vortex into which a
great deal of the matter of the ring was by degrees collected. The
collisions of the gathered fragments caused a revival of the heat, and the
resulting planet was for a long time a mass of glowing gas. Little by
little it cooled once more, until it became fit to be the theatre of life
such as ours. Thus were all the planets formed.
Almost all the matter of those interpenetrating worlds was by this time
concentrated into the newly formed planets. Each of them was and is
composed of all those different kinds of matter. The earth upon which we
are now living is not merely a great ball of physical matter, built of the
atoms of that lowest world, but has also attached to it an abundant supply
of matter of the sixth, the fifth, the fourth and other worlds. It is well
known to all students of science that particles of matter never actually
touch one another, even in the hardest of substances. The spaces between
them are always far greater in proportion than their own size--enormously
greater. So there is ample room for all the other
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