Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/310

306 reached a depth of 10 to 15 kilometers a reaction sets in. The deeply buried beds of water-bearing detrital formations soften, very likely under the influence of heat generated by the concentrated radioactive minerals, as Professor Joly supposes. Long eras of crumpling, elevation and mountain-formation follow, to be in turn succeeded by other ages of denudation. "The energy which determines the place of yielding and upheaval, and ordains that the mountains shall stand around the continental border," passes through a rhythmic interchange or cycle. The cosmogonical process which I have described embodies an analogous cycle, embracing the formation of matter from the ether, and most abundantly in the vicinity of stellar aggregates, by the fixation of the radiant energy, outpouring from the disintegrating stellar substance. Then follow, in turn, the concentration of the material on the borders of the earlier galaxies and the birth of new heavens. In proof of this association of old and new along a border region, the similar distribution of the fourth-type and helium stars, which probably represent the extremes of a thermal series, may be cited.

The conception of a universal ether is to many so vague that the distinction between ether and a purely spiritual atmosphere seems slight; yet the difference is fundamental. The mind of man is not conditioned by space. Thought can not be measured by the yardstick. Ether, on the contrary, occupies space. The dimensions of its waves have been made the fundamental standards of our units of length. Nevertheless, we still grope and guess as to the real structure and nature of the ether. Some of its properties seem to verge on the metaphysical. Back of it, we have glimpses of a source of energy which is inexhaustible, as if it were most intimately linked with the Infinite Source of all existence. Matter which used to be looked upon as dead, and as incapable of exhibiting energy except as this was thrust upon it from without by physical forces, begins to look almost alive. "It moves," said Galileo, of the solid earth; and to-day the delighted physicist, armed with the spectroscope and spinthariscope, Crookes's tube and the electrometer, finds, in the Zeeman effect or the radium emanation, evidence that the atom is an orderly maze of bewildering motion. Its inertia is a gyroscopic inertia. Absolute rest would be nonentity. Everywhere the universe speaks of never-ending life and motion. Creation is not the bringing forth of an infinite number of dead structureless particles, sent out as a set of miserable little waifs at some indefinitely remote epoch and left to clash without guidance, without purpose. Creation is perpetual. The interiors of matter are seen to be more and more wonderful, more and more intensely active, as we approach the sacred portals where divine influx from the Soul of the Universe quickens into the energy which is matter.