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Accordingly, it is using extreme understatement, to say that every pure original thought has a genesis equally ancient, earnest, vital with any product in Nature, has present relationships no less broad and cosmical, and an evolution implying the like industries, veritable and precious beyond all scope of affirmation.

The finite mind is certainly competent to trace out the development of the fowl within the egg; and I know not on what ground it should find more difficulty in unravelling the complexities of the development of the earth. In fact, as Kant has well remarked, the cosmical process is really simpler than the biological.

An insignificant satellite of a third rate sun, which, with the far grander suns whose light we dimly discern at night, may all be swept away in some flurry ofcosmical weather,” that the formation or the dissolution of such a body would be an event of any beyond the most insignificant importance, is now known to be almost ridiculous.

From anything like a cosmical point of view, the entirety of imaginative literature's themes and results as we get them to-day seems painfully narrow. All that has been put in statement, tremendous as it is, what is it compared with the vast fields and values and varieties left unreap'd?

Whether multiplied experiences taught men of science to wait before thus deciding, or however matters fell out, it certainly befell before very long that the terrible doctrine of cosmical development was supported by such powerful evidence, astronomical and terrestrial, as to appear wholly irresistible.

To the question, therefore, respecting the cosmical quantity, the first and negative answer is: "The world has no beginning in time, and no absolute limit in space." For, in the contrary case, it would be limited by a void time on the one hand, and by a void space on the other.

Her position of lofty isolation has been exchanged for one of community and mutual aid. The astronomer has become, in the highest sense of the term, a physicist; while the physicist is bound to be something of an astronomer. This, then, is what is designed to be conveyed by the "foundation of astronomical or cosmical physics."

The meteoric hypothesis was naturally extended from the maintenance of the sun's heat to the formation of the bodies circling round him. The earth no less doubtless than the other planets is still growing. Cosmical matter in the shape of falling stars and aërolites, to the amount, adopting Professor Newton's estimate, of 100 tons daily, is swept up by it as it pursues its orbital round.

Some important points in cosmical economy have, indeed, become quite clear within the last fifty years, and scarcely any longer admit of a difference of opinion. One of these is that of the true status of nebulæ.

The full significance of this observation was at once recognized by astronomers; it demonstrated beyond all cavil the cosmical origin of the shooting-stars. Some conservative meteorologists kept up the argument for the telluric origin for some decades to come, as a matter of course such a band trails always in the rear of progress.