It seems to be equally uncreatable and indestructible. But
he would, at the same time, admit that his experience no more
sufficed to settle the question than the observation of an animal
for a single day would settle the question of the duration of its
life, or prove that it had neither beginning nor end. He would
probably admit that even matter itself may be a product of
evolution. The astronomer finds it difficult to conceive that the
great nebulous masses which he sees in the celestial spaces--
millions of times larger than the whole solar system, yet so
tenuous that they offer not the slightest obstruction to the
passage of a ray of light through their whole length--situated in
what seems to be a region of eternal cold, below anything that we
can produce on the earth's surface, yet radiating light, and with
it heat, like an incandescent body--can be made up of the same
kind of substance that we have around us on the earth's surface.
Who knows but that the radiant property that Becquerel has found
in certain forms of matter may be a residuum of some original form
of energy which is inherent in great cosmical masses, and has fed
our sun during all the ages required by the geologist for the
structure of the earth's crusts? It may be that in this phenomenon
we have the key to the great riddle of the universe, with which
profounder secrets of matter than any we have penetrated will be
opened to the eyes of our successors.
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