here and there, are the dying suns; and if you look closely you
will see, flitting like ghosts across the light of their luminous
neighbours, the gaunt frames of dead worlds. Here and there are
vast stretches of loose cosmic dust that seems to be gathering
into embryonic stars; here and there are stars in infancy or in
strenuous youth. You detect all the chief phases of the making of
a world in the forms and fires of these colossal aggregations of
matter. Like the chance crowd on which you may look down in the
square of a great city, they range from the infant to the worn
and sinking aged. There is this difference, however, that the
embryos of worlds sprawl, gigantic and luminous, across the
expanse; that the dark and mighty bodies of the dead rush, like
the rest, at twenty or fifty miles a second; and that at
intervals some appalling blaze, that dims even the fearful
furnaces of the living, seems to announce the resurrection of the
dead. And there is this further difference, that, strewn about
the intermediate space between the gigantic spheres, is a mass of
cosmic dust--minute grains, or large blocks, or shoals consisting
of myriads of pieces, or immeasurable clouds of fine gas--that
seems to be the rubbish left over after the making of worlds, or
the material gathering for the making of other worlds.

This is the universe that the nineteenth century discovered and
the twentieth century is interpreting. Before we come to tell the
fortunes of our little earth we have to see how matter is
gathered into these stupendous globes of fire, how they come
sometimes to have smaller bodies circling round them on which
living things may appear, how they supply the heat and light and
electricity that the living things need, and how the story of
life on a planet is but a fragment of a larger story. We have to