evolved by the combustion of carbon), have thrown a great deal of doubt
upon the older estimates of the age of the earth.

The discussion of the details of these theories would be unprofitable.
But through the mists of all these conflicting theories and
probabilities two facts of tremendous importance for our modern world
emerge in clear relief, namely, that the grand law of the conservation
of matter still holds true, and hence that _the matter of our world must
have had an origin at some time in the past wholly different in degree
and different in kind from any process going on around us that we call a
natural process_. These elements of high atomic weight that break down
into others of lower atomic weight may be so rare because they have been
about all used up in this process. At any rate, so far from revealing
the origin of matter as a process now going on, these phenomena are an
objective demonstration that all matter is more or less unstable and
liable under some unknown but ever-acting force to lose some portion of
that fund of energy with which it seems to have been primarily endowed.
_Not the evolution of matter but the degeneration of matter_ is the
plain and unescapable lesson to be drawn from these facts. The varieties
of matter may change greatly, and one variety or one chemical element
may be transformed into another. But this transformation _is by loss and
not by gain_. It is degeneration and not upward evolution that is now
opened up before our astonished eyes by this peep into the ultimate
laboratories of nature; and he is surely a blind observer who cannot
read in these facts the grand truth that all this substance called
matter with which science deals in her manifold studies must at some
time in the past, I care not when, have been _called into existence in
some manner no longer operative_. The past eternity of matter, as well
as its progressive development from the simple to the complex, seems
manifestly out of consideration in view of the facts as we now know