CHAPTER II
THE WORLD OF LONG AGO
I HAD a dream, which yet was not a dream.
I found myself as an observer of the world as it was 100 million years ago, inhabiting a planet in attendance upon one of those distant stars of space, in the middle of a sidereal universe analogous to that which exists at present, though it was not the same, for the universe of that time was destroyed long ago and the universe of to-day did not yet exist.
At that time, also, there were stars and constellations, but they were neither the same constellations nor the same stars.
There were suns, moons, inhabited earths, days, nights, seasons, years, countries, beings, impressions, thoughts, facts; but they were not the same as now.
The Earth which we inhabit was not yet in existence. The materials which compose it floated through space in a state of diffused nebulosity, gravitating about the slowly condensing solar focus. There were as yet neither water, nor air, nor earth, nor heavens, nor planets, nor animals, nor any one of those bodies reputed to be simple by chemistry, as oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, lead, copper, etc. The gas (which by its condensations and final transformations was eventually to give rise to the various gaseous, liquid, and solid substances at present constituting our globe and its inhabitants) was a single homogeneous gas, containing within it, like an unconscious chrysalis, the possibilities of the future. But no prophet could have foreseen the unknown which slumbered amid its mysteries.
Our planet showed at that time the aspect of those vague gaseous nebulæ which the telescope discovers on the floor of the skies and which the spectroscope analyses. The solar nebula in the course of condensation floated among the stars. All humanity with its history, every one of us with all his energies, all the living beings of this Earth, were contained in the germ of that nebula and its forces; but the beings and the things which we know were not to come into existence until after a long incubation of centuries. In the place of what was destined to be the Earth, there was nothing but a gas floating in starry space. Nor was it in the real “space” where we are now, for the Earth, the planets, and the whole solar system came from afar and flew swiftly across the void.
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In the history of creation, 100 million years pass like a day; they dwindle and disappear, a fugitive dream, into the bosom of that eternity which absorbs all.
Then, although our planet did not exist, there were stars, suns, solar systems, and inhabited worlds as there are now. The humanities which peopled those worlds lived their lives as we live ours.