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miles off and Neptune six miles off. 2 Then nothingness and nothingness except for small particles and drifting scraps of attenuated vapour for thousands of miles. The nearest star to Earth on this scale would be 40,000 miles away.
    These figures will serve perhaps to give one some conception of the immense emptiness of space in which the drama of life goes on.
    For in all this enormous vacancy of space we know certainly of life only upon the surface of our Earth. It does not penetrate much more than three miles down into the 4,000 miles that separate us from the centre of our globe, and it does not reachmore than five miles above its surface. Apparently all the limitlessness of space is otherwise empty and dead.
    The deepest ocean dredgings go down to five miles. The highest recorded flight of an aeroplane is little more than four miles. Men have reached to seven miles up in balloons, but at a cost of great suffering. No bird can fly so high as five miles, and small birds and insects which have been carried up by aeroplanes drop off insensible far below that level. 3

2
The World in Time
    In the last fifty years there has been much very fine and interesting speculation on the part of scientific men upon the age and origin of our Earth. Here we cannot pretend to give even a summary of such speculations because they involve the most subtle mathematical and physical considerations. The truth is that the physical and astronomical sciences are still too undeveloped as yet to make anything of the sort more than an illustrative guesswork. The general tendency has been to make the estimated age of our globe longer and longer. It now seems probable that the Earth has had an independent existence as a spinning planet flying round and round the sun for a longer period than 2,000 million years. It may have been much longer than that. 1 This is a length of time that absolutely overpowers the imagination.
    Before that vast period of separate existence, the sun and Earth and the other planets that circulate round the sun may have been a great swirl of diffused matter in space. The telescope reveals to us in various parts of the heavens luminous spiral clouds of matter, the spiral nebulae, 2 which appear to be in rotation about a centre. It is supposed by many astronomers that the sun and its planets were once such a spiral, and that their matter has undergone concentration into its present form. Through majestic aeons that concentration went on until in that vast remoteness of the past for which we have given figures, the world and its moon were distinguishable. They were spinning then much faster than they are spinning now; they were at a lesser distance from the sun; they travelled round it very much faster, and they were probably incandescent or molten atthe surface. The sun itself was a much greater blaze in the heavens.
    If we could go back 3 through that infinitude of time and see the Earth in this earlier stage of its history, we should behold a scene more like the interior of a blast furnace or the surface of a lava flow before it cools and cakes over than any other contemporary scene. No water would be visible because all the water there was would still be superheated steam in a stormy atmosphere of sulphurous and metallic vapours. Beneath this would swirl and boil an ocean of molten rock substance. Across a sky of fiery clouds the glare of the hurrying sun and moon would sweep swiftly like hot breaths of flame.
    Slowly by degrees as one million of years followed another, this fiery scene would lose its eruptive incandescence. The vapours in the sky would rain down and become less dense overhead; great slaggy cakes of solidifying rock would appear upon the surface of the molten sea, and sink under it to be replaced by other floating masses. The sun and moon growing now each more distant and each smaller, would rush with diminishing swiftness across the heavens. The moon now, because of its smaller size, would be already cooled far