Page:The evolution of worlds - Lowell.djvu/82

56 heat. Perhaps, then, we had no gloriously pyrotechnic birth, but a more modest coming into existence. But about this we must ourselves modestly be content to remain for the present in the dark.

Not the least important feature of the theory I have thus outlined is that it finishes out the round of evolution. It becomes a conception sapiens in se ipso totus, teres atque rotundus. To frame a theory that carries one back into the past, to leave one there hung up in heaven, is for inconclusiveness as bad as the ancient fabulous support of the world, which Atlas carried standing on an elephant upheld by a tortoise. What supported the tortoise we were not told. So here, if meteorites were our occasioning, we must account for the meteorites, starting from our present state. This the present presentation does.

Thus do the stones that fall from the sky inform us of two historic events in our solar system's career. They tell us first and directly of a nebula made up of them, out of which the several planets were by agglomeration formed and of which material they are the last ungathered remains. And then they speak to us more remotely but with no less certainty of a time antedating that nebula itself, a time when the nebula's constituents still lay enfolded in the womb of a former Sun.

Man's interest in them hitherto has been, as with other things, chiefly proprietary. Greed of them has