EARTH AND ITS NEIGHBOURS
our imagination to realise through what elements, including iron and other metals. a wonderful universe we are rushing. In the cloudy stage astronomers call the Think, too, of the marvellous making of sun a giant sun, and in the more conour little world. It is interesting to densed stage they call it a dwarf sun ; and watch a sculptor making a figure out of finally the dwarf sun cools down entirely marble, or to watch a painter putting and becomes a dead, dark sun. trees and hills and faces on canvas; but That is a very brief sketch of how suns on our journey through space we can are made. But sometimes, while suns are watch a much more wonderful artistcontracting, their surface breaks up and we can watch the Creator's work of making . the fragments become planets revolving suns and planets and find out how this round them. Something of that sort hapworld came into being. pened to our Sun; and the fragments grew into the planets, and one of the THE CLOUD THAT IS BEGINNING TO BE A SUN LIKE OURS planets is our Earth. What we call empty space is not empty ; It is surely wonderful to think that the it is full of an invisible wonderful some- Earth was made out of the invisible ether thing we call ether, and it is this ether o(space, and that at one time all its rocks which conveys light to us, and tells us and seas and animals and plants were of the house across the street, of the suns nothing but hydrogen and helium gas! millions of miles away, of the friend It is surely wonderful to think that a across the room. Now at places in space Great Power. could bring so much out of something miraculous seems to be going so little! And one of the most wonderful on in the ether. things in the making of the Earth was We see a glowing cloud, millions of the final steps that made Life possible. miles in diameter, which has blossomed in OUT OF THE FLAME AND FIRE CAME THE the invisible ether. It certainly was not VERY TmNGS LIFE WANTED always there, and if it were not always At first this big ball of ours was simply a there some Power must have made it. God globe of flaming gases and molten metals. made it. He is beginning to make it into As it coole.d it formed a solid metallic a sun. When astronomers examine such crust, and as the metal cooled and solidia cloud with telescopes and spectroscopes fied and condensed, it squeezed out slag they discover that it is composed chiefly as cooling iron in an iron foundry does. of the two gases, hydrogen and helium. This slag formed the early crust of the That does not seem very wonderful, Earth. And the amazing thing was that perhaps, but chemists believe that all the the crust contained iron and lime and elements in the world are built up of sulphur and sodium and potassium-}ust atoms of these two light gases. In the those elements which were necessary to life. More amazing still, when the cooling cloud, hydrogen and helium are being prepared to make all the other elements crust cracked, and when giant volcanoes that go to make suns and planets. At this spouted all over the world, out of the stage the cloud is very thin, thinner even bowels of the Earth came steam which than the air we breathe ; but as the gases condensed into water and carbon dioxide form, and as new elements are constructed, gas, and so the Earth got rivers and seas the cloud contracts, or shrinks, and grows and an atmosphere. After millions and denser and hotter. The chemical pro- millions of years of flame and fire, of cesses going on, and the shrinking of the seething and boiling and bubbling, there cloud, both produce great heat, and so the carne out of this fragment of the Sun exactly the right things to make life. The cloud becomes a blazing sun like ours. water, lifted and tossed by the air, broke THE WONDERFUL THOUGHT THAT SO MUCH CAME FROM SO LITTLE down the crust into soil and mud- into But at a certain point the heat leaks the clay of life. All that is amazing and wonderful, but away faster than it is formed, and the sun cools, and as it cools down heavier all would have been in vain if the Sun elements are formed-the gases become had not been shining across space nearly a hundred million miles away. When the partly fluid and partly solid. \tVe can see in space plenty of suns which Sun broke up into bits, and the bits went have reached this stage, and the spectro- flying as fiery planets round it, it might , scope shows that they contain numerous have seemed an unfortunate accident; 12
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