Page:The evolution of worlds - Lowell.djvu/218

180 idea, I am aware, is as reprehensible as the atrocious crime of being a young man. Yet the world could not get on without both. Time is a sure reformer and will render the most hardened case of youth senile in the end. So even a new idea may grow respectable at last. And it is really as well to make its acquaintance while it still has vigor in it as to wait till it is old and may be embraced with impunity. Boasted conservatism is troglodytic, and usually proves a self-conferred euphuism for dull. For conservatism proceeds from slowness of apprehension. It may be necessary for certain minds to be in the rear of the procession, but it is of doubtful glory to find distinction in the fact.

Thus the youth of a world, like the babyhood of an individual, is passed screened from immediate contact from without. That this is the only way that life can originate on a planet we cannot say, but that it is away in which it does occur, our own Earth attests, and that, moreover, it is the way with all planets of sufficient size, the present aspect of the major planets shows. It may well be that with celestial bodies as with earthly species, some swaddle their young, others cast them forth to take their chance, and that those that most protect them rear the higher progeny in the end. What glories in evolution thus await the giant planets when they shall have sufficiently cooled down, we can only