Fig. 1.—The Great Nebula in Orion.
This illustration and the four that follow are reprinted from Sir Robert Stawell Ball’s “The Earth’s Beginning,” with acknowledgments to Cassel & Co., London, and D. Appleton & Co., New York.
We can imagine only two ways by which the world and its forms of life came into existence. One is to suppose that all things were created out of nothing, and made perfect at once, by a being of infinite power and intelligence who never had beginning. That is the biblical, the miraculous, the supernatural way. The other is to suppose that the raw material always existed, and that all things have been developed from primitive origins, the higher forms gradually emerging by evolution out of the lower. That is the scientific, the natural way. The first view is an assumption utterly devoid of support. The evidence proves that nothing was made, that things have grown.
Not only do we know that a creating God is a mere guess; that he is unthinkable in quantity or quality, that he bears no conceivable mark of reality; not only do we know that the creation of a universe out of nothing is wholly unintelligible; but the evidence of astronomy points clearly to the conclusion that our planet has been evolved by condensation from a nebula—from the raw material of which worlds are made; the evidence of geology portrays the fact that the earth has become what it is through a process of continuous change covering many millions of years; and the evidence of botany and of biology, studied in living forms and in fossil remains, proves conclusively that the plants and animals of the world have acquired their present character and mould as a result of infinite variations from and improvements upon the first simple forms of life that arose in the primeval world.
Fig. 2.—The Great Spiral Nebula.
Not creation, then, but evolution, is the secret of the world’s infinite diversity of things. Nothing was made; everything has grown. Perfection is not at the beginning, but at the end of nature’s efforts. All things have been fashioned by a process of endless transformation—blind, boundless, staggering, stumbling—at times falling back, but on the whole moving forward, pressed by the relentless forces inherent in substance and shaped in accordance with immutable law. Such a process has covered the earth with its amazing display of vegetation, and with its strange and wondrous population of things that swim and creep and fly and run.
In sketching the story of evolution, as that story is revealed to us by science, let us begin with the evolution of the starry heavens, that we may learn how the world was born.
As the giant telescope sweeps the abysmal depths of space over a distance of at least 4,000 billion miles, it reveals here and there among the hundred million stars, vast patches of cloud-like material. This material is called nebula, and it is the original substance of which all suns and planets are made. One hundred and twenty thousand of these nebulæ come within the range of the great Crossley Reflector at the Lick Observatory. The telescope photographs the nebula—celestial photography is one of the most interesting and instructive branches of modern astronomy—and when you look at a picture of a nebula, you see an actual photograph of an object that marks the beginning of Nature’s work.
