must occur. Then without question the mutual
impact must shatter both colliding bodies into vapor,
or vapor combined with meteoric fragments; in short,
into a veritable nebula, the matrix of future worlds.
Thus the dark star, which is the last term of one series
of cosmic changes, becomes the first term of another
series--at once a post-nebular and a pre-nebular condition;
and the nebular hypothesis, thus amplified,
ceases to be a mere linear scale, and is rounded out to
connote an unending series of cosmic cycles, more
nearly satisfying the imagination.

In this extended view, nebulae and luminous stars are
but the infantile and adolescent stages of the life history
of the cosmic individual; the dark star, its adult
stage, or time of true virility. Or we may think of the
shrunken dark star as the germ-cell, the pollen-grain, of
the cosmic organism. Reduced in size, as becomes a
germ-cell, to a mere fraction of the nebular body from
which it sprang, it yet retains within its seemingly non-
vital body all the potentialities of the original organism,
and requires only to blend with a fellow-cell to
bring a new generation into being. Thus may the
cosmic race, whose aggregate census makes up the
stellar universe, be perpetuated--individual solar systems,
such as ours, being born, and growing old, and
dying to live again in their descendants, while the universe
as a whole maintains its unified integrity throughout
all these internal mutations--passing on, it may be,
by infinitesimal stages, to a culmination hopelessly beyond