Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/412

408 electricity and who can not discover anything mysterious about the operations on the floor of a business exchange is in need of a mental shaking.

It is useless for us to attempt to answer such questions as, what is electricity? Or, what is a conscious being? Or, what is hydrogen? We can only answer such questions in unknown terms. But we have learned much about all of these things. Whether we consider matter in the minutest details of its structure or in the larger fields into which the telescope and the spectroscope have led us, we find the same array of wonders. How many of those who talk to us of the work of the Creator have the faintest idea of what those words mean? Have all of these electrons, and atoms and molecules and worlds and stars and stellar systems been created?

We are dependent on molecular vibrations on the sun for the conditions which make life possible. That heat energy which we receive from our sun will finally fail. The sun will become cold. The earth will freeze. Our atmosphere will become liquid and finally solid. The stars are also going through the same history. Their heat is also being continually radiated into space. The operation is like that of a clock which has been wound up and is running down. There must have been a beginning, and there will be an end, in cold and universal night. Now and then two dead stars may collide and vaporize into a nebula. This nebula may finally become a planetary system which may become the habitation of conscious beings; but it will go through the same history. And the number of bodies capable of colliding and forming world systems will have been reduced by one. To be sure, the probability of the occurrence of such collision happening during a given time interval will diminish continually, but there will evidently be an end of the present order of things. The results of recent work on the phenomena of radioactive bodies make it probable that the beginning of life on this earth may be much farther back in time than was formerly supposed. The heat which has been radiated from our earth has been in part supplied by the energy of these atomic explosions. It may be that the temperature of our sun may be thus maintained for a longer time than was formerly thought possible. But such considerations do not in any way change our ideas concerning the nature of the operations which are going on. Here also, in these radioactive bodies we find a store of energy which is being continually drawn upon. It is manifesting itself finally as heat which is being continually radiated into space. It may be that we must place a higher estimate than was formerly thought necessary upon the vast store of energy which the visible universes of to-day have possessed in the remote past. It may be that the work of creation was greater than we have supposed. It may be that the end is more remote than we now think. But even if we assent to the