Page:The evolution of worlds - Lowell.djvu/192

158 great cold is as prohibitive of chemic combination as great heat. Phosphorus, which evinces such avidity for oxygen at ordinary temperatures as to have got its name from the way it publishes the fact, at very low ones shows a coolness for its affinity amounting to absolute unconcern. Thus only within a certain range of temperature does chemical combination occur. To remain above or below this is to stay forever immortally dead. To get hot enough in the first place, and then subsequently to cool, are therefore essential processes to a body which is to know evolutionary advance.

To pen the history of the solar system and leave out of it all mention of its most transcendentally wonderful result, the chemical evolution attendant upon cooling, would be to play "Hamlet" with Hamlet left out. For the thing which makes the second half of the great cosmic drama so inconceivably grand is the building up of the infinitely little into something far finer than the infinitely great. The mechanical action that first tore a sun apart, and then whirled the fragments into the beautifully symmetric system we behold to-day, is of a grandeur which is at least conceivable; the molecular one that, beginning where the other left off, built up first the diamond and then humanity is one that passes our power to imagine. That out of the aggregation of meteorites should come man, a being able to look back over his own genesis, to be cognizant of it, as it were,