EVIDENCE OF THE INITIAL CATASTROPHE IN OUR OWN CASE
By quite another class of dark bodies than those we contemplated in
the last chapter is the immediate space about us tenanted. For that,
too, is anything but the void our senses give us to understand.
Could we rise a hundred miles above the Earth’s surface we should be
highly sorry we came, for we should incontinently be killed by flying
brickbats. Instead of masses of a sunlike size we should have to do
with bits of matter on the average smaller than ourselves but hardly on
that account innocuous, as they would strike us with fifteen hundred
times the speed of an express train. Only in one respect are the two
classes of erratics alike, both remain invisible till they are upon
us. Even so, the cause of their visibility is different. The one is
announced by the light it reflects, the other by the glow it gives out
on its destruction. These last are the meteorites or shooting-stars.
They are as well known to every one for their commonness as,
fortunately, the first are rare. On any starlight night one need not
tarry long before one of these visitants darts across the sky, a
brilliant thread of fire gone almost ere it be descried.
Usually this is all of which one is made aware. Silent, ghostlike, the
apparition comes and goes, and nothing more of it is either seen or
heard. But sometimes there is a good deal more. Occasionally a large
ball of flame shoots through the air, a detonation like distant thunder
startles the ear, and a luminous train, persisting for several seconds,
floats slowly away. Finally if one be fortunate to be near,—but not too
near,—one or more masses of stone are seen to fall swiftly and bury
themselves in the ground. These are meteorites: far wanderers come at
last to rest in graves they have dug themselves.
A great revolution has taken place lately in our ideas concerning
meteorites. Indeed, it was not so very long ago, since modern man
admitted their astronomic character at all. He looked as askance at
them as he did at fossils. It was the fall at Aigle, in Switzerland,
April 26, 1803, that first opened men’s eyes to the fact that such
falls actually occurred. It is more than a nine days’ wonder at times
how long men, as well as puppies, can remain blind. To admit that
stones fell from heaven, however, was not to see whence they came.
Their paternity was imputed to nearly every body in the sky. They were
at first supposed to have been ejected from earthly volcanic vents,
then from volcanoes in the Moon. That they are of domestic manufacture
is, however, negatived by the paths they severally pursue. Nor can they
for like reason have been ejected from the Sun.
The Earth was not their birthplace. It is alien ground in which they
lie at last and from which we transfer them to glass cases in our
museums. This fact about their parentage they tell by the speed with
which they enter our air. They become visible 100 miles up and explode
at from 20 to 10, and their speed has been found to be from 10 to 40
miles a second, which is that of cosmic bodies moving in large elliptic
orbits about the Sun,—a speed greater than the Earth could ever have
imparted.
Four classes of such small celestial bodies tenant space where the
planets move: sporadic shooting-stars, meteorites, meteor-streams, and
comets. The discovery of the relation of each of these to the solar
system and then to each other forms one of the latest chapters of
astronomic history. For they turn out to be generically one.
It was long, however, before this was perceived. The first step was
taken simultaneously by Professor Olmstead of Yale and Twining in 1833
from reasoning on the superb November meteor-shower of that year. All
the shooting-stars, “thick as snowflakes in a storm,” had a common
radiant from which they seemed to come. Thus they argued that the
meteors must all be travelling in parallel lines along an orbit which
the previous shower, of 1799, showed to be periodic. This was the first
recognition of a meteor-swarm.
The next advance was when Schiaparelli, in 1862, pointed out the
remarkable connection between meteor-swarms and comets. On calculation
the August meteor-stream and the comet of 1862 proved to be pursuing
exactly the same path. Soon other instances of like association were
discovered, and we now know mathematically that meteor-streams can
be, deductively that they must be, and observationally that they are,
disintegrated comets. More than one comet has even been seen to split.
Then came the recognition that comets are not visitors from space, as
Sir Isaac Newton and Laplace supposed, but part and parcel of our own
solar system. Without going into the history of the subject, which
includes Gauss, Schiaparelli, and finally Fabry’s great Memoir, much
too little known, the proof can, I think, be made comprehensible
without too much technique, thanks to the fact that the Sun is speeding
through space at the rate of eleven miles a second.
Orbits described by bodies under the action of a central force are
always conic sections, as Sir Isaac Newton proved. There are two
classes of such curves: those which return into themselves, such as
the circle and ellipse, and those which do not, the hyperbolæ. If a
body travel in the first or closed class about the Sun, it is clearly
a member of his family; if in the second, it is a visitor who bows to
him only in passing and never returns. Which orbit it shall pursue
depends at a given distance solely upon the speed of the body; if that
speed be one the Sun can control, the body will move in an ellipse;
if greater, in an hyperbola. Obviously the Sun can control just the
speed he can impart. Now a comet entering the system from without
would already possess a motion of its own which, when compounded with
the solar-acquired speed, would make one greater than the Sun could
master. Comets, therefore, if visitors from space, should all move
in hyperbolæ. None for certain do; and only six out of four hundred
even hint at it. Comets, then, are all members of the solar family,
excentric ones, but not to be denied recognition of kinship for such
behavior.
Still, admittance to the solar family circle was denied to meteorites
and shooting-stars. Thus Professor Kirkwood, in 1861, had considered
“that the motions of some luminous meteors (or cometoids, as perhaps
they might be called) have been decidedly indicative of an origin
beyond the limits of the solar system.” Here cometoid was an apt
coinage, but when comets were later shown not to be of extra-solar
origin, the reasoning carried luminous meteors in its train.[1] Finally
Schiaparelli, in 1871, concluded an able Memoir on the subject with the
decision that “a stellar origin for meteorites was the most likely and
that meteorites were identifiable with shooting-stars.”[2] A pregnant
remark this, though not exactly as the author thought, for instead of
proving both interstellar, as he intended, both have proved to be solar
bound.
[1] “Mem. del Reale Inst. Lombardo,” Vol. XII. III della serie III.
[2] Quoted in “Luminous Meteors,” Committee’s Report for 1870-1871, p.
48.
It was Professor Newton, in 1889, who first showed that meteorites
were pursuing, as a rule, small elliptic orbits about the Sun, and
that their motion was direct. He, too, was the first to surmise that
meteorites are but bigger shooting-stars.
Now, as to their connection. Of direct evidence we have little. A
few meteors have been observed to come from the known radiants of
shooting-stars. Two instances we have of the fall of meteorites during
star showers. One in 1095, when the Saxon Chronicle tells us stars
fell “so thickly that no man could count them, one of which struck the
ground and when a bystander cast water upon it steam was raised with a
great noise of boiling.” The second case was the fall of a siderite,
eight pounds’ worth of nickel-iron, at Mazapil during the Andromede
shower of 1885, which was by many supposed to be a part of the lost
Biela comet. It contained graphite enough to pencil its own history,
but unfortunately could not write. The direction from which it came was
not recorded, and so the connection between it and the comet not made
out.
[Illustration: THE RADIANT OF A METEORIC SHOWER, SHOWING ALSO THE PATHS
OF THREE METEORS WHICH DO NOT BELONG TO THIS SHOWER—AFTER DENNING.]
If our direct knowledge is thus scanty, reasoning affords surer ground
for belief. For at this point there steps in a bit of news about the
family relations of shooting-stars from a source hardly to have been
anticipated. Indeed, it arose from the thought to examine a qualitative
statement in Young’s “Astronomy” quantitatively. Mathematics is simply
precise reasoning, applied usually to the discovery that a pet theory
will not work. But sometimes it presents one with an unexpected find.
This is what it did here.
It is an interesting fact of observation that more meteors are visible
at six o’clock in the morning than at six o’clock at night in the
proportion of 3 to 1. This seeming preference for early rising is due
to no matutinality on the part of the meteors, but to the matin aspect
then presented by the Earth combined with its orbital motion round the
Sun. For at six in the morning the observer stands on the advancing
side of the Earth, at the bow of the airship; at six at night he is at
the stern. He, therefore, runs into the meteors at sunrise and slips
away from them at sunset. He is pelted in the morning in consequence.
Just as a pedestrian facing a storm gets wetter in front than behind.
[Illustration: METEORS
Diagram explaining their proportionate visibility.
—————— _denotes true paths._
—— - —— ” _apparent paths._
—————— - - - ” _Earth’s path._]
So far the books. Now let us examine this quantitatively according to
the direction in which the meteors themselves may be moving before
the encounter. Suppose, in the first place, that they were travelling
in every possible direction, with the average velocity of the most
erratic members of the family, the great comets. On this supposition
calculation shows that we ought to meet 5.8 times as many at six in the
morning as at six at night. If their orbits were smaller than this,
say, something like those of the asteroids, we should find 7.6 to 1 for
the ratio.
Suppose, however, that they were all travelling in the same sense as
the Earth, direct as it is called in contradistinction to retrograde,
and let us calculate what proportion in that case we should meet at the
two hours respectively. It turns out to be 2.4 to 1 for the parabolic
ones, 3.3 to 1 for the smaller orbited, or almost precisely what
observation shows to be the case [see NOTE 1]. Here, then, a bit of
abstract reasoning has apprized us of a most interesting family fact;
to wit, that the great majority of shooting-stars are travelling in the
same orderly sense as ourselves. Furthermore, as some must be moving
in smaller orbits than the mean, others must be journeying in greater;
or, in other words, shooting-stars are scattered throughout the system.
In short, these little bodies are tiny planets themselves, as truly
planets as the asteroids,—asteroids of a general instead of a localized
habit.
Thus meteorites and shooting-stars are kin, and from the fact that
they are pursuing orbits not very unlike our own we get our initial
hint of a community of origin. Indeed, they are the little bricks out
of which the whole structure of our solar system was built up. What
we encounter to-day are the left-over fragments of what once was, the
fraction that has not as yet been swept up by the larger bodies. And
this is why these latter-day survivors move, as a rule, direct. To run
counter to the consensus of trend is to be subjected to greater chance
of extermination. Those that did so have already been weeded out.
[Illustration: THE MART IRON.
(_Proc. Wash. Acad. of Sci._ vol. II. Plate VI.)]
From the behavior of meteorites we proceed to scan their appearance.
And here we notice some further telltale facts about them. Their
conduct informed us of their relationship, their character bespeaks
their parentage.
Most meteorites are stones, but one or two per cent are nearly pure
iron mixed with nickel. When picked up, they are usually covered with
a glossy thin black crust. This overcoat they have put on in coming
through our air. Air-begotten, too, are the holes with which many of
them are pitted. For entering our atmosphere with their speed in space
is equivalent to immersing them suddenly in a blowpipe flame of several
thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Thus their surface is burnt and fused to
a cinder. Yet in spite of being warm to the touch their hearts are
still cosmically cold. The Dhurmsala meteorite falling into moist earth
was found an hour afterwards coated with frost. Agassiz likened it to
the Chinese culinary _chef d’œuvre_ “fried ice.” It is the cold of
space, 200° or more Centigrade below zero, that they bear within, proof
of their cosmic habitat.
That they are bits of a once larger mass is evident on their face.
Their shape shows that they are not wholes but parts, while their
constitution bespeaks them anything but elementary. Diagnosis of it
yields perhaps their most interesting bit of news. For it shows their
origin. Their autopsy proves them to contain thirty known elements,
and not one that is new. The list includes all the substances most
common on the Earth’s surface, which is suggestive; but, what is still
more instructive, these are combined into minerals which largely
differ from those with which we are superficially familiar. Professor
Newton, whose specialty they were, has said: “In general they show
no resemblance in their mechanical or mineralogical structure to the
granitic and surface rocks of the Earth. One condition was certainly
necessary in their formation, viz. the absence of free oxygen and of
enough water to oxidize the iron.” Thus they are not of the Earth
earthy; nor yet, poor little waifs, of the upper crust of any other
body.
[Illustration: SECTION OF METEORITE SHOWING WIDMANNSTÄTTIAN LINES.
(Field Columbian Museum, Chicago.)]
[Illustration: METEORITE, TOLUCA.
(Field Columbian Museum, Chicago.)]
In them prove to be occluded gases, which can be got out by heating in
the laboratory, and which must have got in when the meteorites were
still subjected to great heat and pressure. For only thus could these
gases have been absorbed. Both such heat and such pressure accuse some
great solid body as origin of this flotsam of the sky. Fragments now,
they owe to its disruption their present separate state. This parent
mass must have been much larger and more massive than the Earth, as the
grate amount of occluded hydrogen, sometimes one-third the volume at
500° C., of the meteorite seems to testify.
The two classes of meteorites, the stone and the iron, show this
further by the very differences they exhibit between themselves. For
both the amount and the proportions of the occluded gases in the two
prove to be quite distinct. In the stones the quantity of gas is
greater and the composition is diverse. In the stones carbonic acid gas
is common, carbon monoxide rare; in the irons the ratio is just the
other way. Thus Wright found in nine specimens of the iron meteorites:—
CO₂ CO H CH₄
11.5% 32.4% 54.1% 00% of the total;
in ten of stone:—
CO₂ CO H CH₄
60.1% 3.4% 32.0% 2.1%
The stones are much lighter than the iron, their specific gravities
being as 3 to 7 or 8 for the metallic. The stones, therefore, came from
a more superficial layer of the body torn apart than the iron, and the
composition of their occluded gases bears this out. Those in the stones
are such as we may conceive absorbed nearer the surface, those in the
iron from regions deeper down.
Here, then, the meteorites tell us of another, an earlier, stage of
our solar system’s history, one that mounts back to before even the
nebula arose to which we owe our birth. For the large body to whose
dismemberment the meteorites were due can have been no other than the
one whose cataclysmic shattering produced that very nebula which was
for us the origin of things. The meteorites, by continuing unchanged,
link the present to that far-off past. And they tell us, too, that
this body must have been dark. For solid, they inform us, it was, and
solidity in a heavenly body means deficiency of light.
That such corroborative testimony to a cataclysmic origin is
forthcoming in the sky we shall see by turning again to the spiral
nebulæ.
Of the two classes of nebulæ which we contemplated in the last chapter,
the amorphous and the structural, there is more to be said than we
touched on then.
[Illustration: NEBULA ♅ V. 14 CYGNI—AFTER ROBERTS.]
Not only in look are the two quite unlike, but the spectroscope shows
that the difference in appearance is associated with dissimilarity of
character. For the spectrum of the amorphous proves to consist of a
few bright lines, due to hydrogen and nebulium chiefly, in the green,
whence the name green nebulæ. That of the spirals, on the other hand,
is continuous, and therefore white. The great nebula in Andromeda was
one of the first in which this was recognized; and the perception was
pregnant, for no nebula defies resolution more determinedly than it.
We may, therefore, infer that it is not made up of stars, certainly
big enough for us to see. On the other hand, from the fact that its
spectrum is continuous it must be solid or liquid. Young pointed out
that this did not follow, because a gas under great pressure also
gives a continuous spectrum. But he forgot that here no such pressure
could exist. A nebula of compressed gas could not have an irregular
form and would have, in the case of the Andromeda nebula, a mass so
enormous as to preclude supposition. Continuity of spectrum here means
discontinuity of mass. The spectral solidity of the nebula speaks of a
_status quo ante_, not of a condition of condensation now going on.
[Illustration: NEBULA N. G. C. 1499 PERSEI—AFTER ROBERTS.]
[Illustration: NEBULA N. G. C. 6960 IN CYGNUS—AFTER RITCHEY.]
Advanced spectroscopic means reveals that the spectra of these
“white” nebulæ are not simply continuous. Thus that of the Andromeda
nebula shows very faint dark lines crossing it, apparently accordant
with those of the solar spectrum and faint bright ones falling near
and probably coincident with those of the Wolf-Rayet stars, due
to hydrogen, helium, and so forth. These later observations make
practically certain what earlier ones permitted us just now only to
infer: that it is not composed of stars, but of something subtler
still; to wit, of meteorites. The reasoning is interesting, as showing
that if one have hold of a true idea, the stars in their courses fight
for him.
[Illustration: NEBULA M. 51 CANUM VENATICORUM—AFTER RITCHEY.]
Although Lockyer has long been of opinion that the nebulæ are composed
of meteorites, the present argument differs from his. The way in which
their spectra establish their constitution may be outlined as follows:
the white nebulæ are from their structure evidently in process of
evolution, and if they are in stable motion, as we suppose them to be,
their parts are moving round their common centre of gravity. As the
white nebulæ resist resolution as obstinately as the green, these parts
must be not only solid but comminuted (composed of small particles).
Now this would be the case were they flocks of meteorites such as we
have seen composed our own system once upon a time. Though all are
travelling round the centre of gravity of the flock, each is pursuing
its own orbit slightly different from, and intersecting those of, its
neighbors. Collisions between the meteors must therefore constantly
occur, and the question is, are these shocks sufficient to cause light.
Let us take our own system and consider two meteorites at our distance
from the Sun, travelling in the same sense, the one in an ellipse,
the other in a circle, with a major axis five per cent greater and
meeting the other at aphelion. This would be no improper jostle for
such heavenly bodies. If we calculate the speeds of both and deduct
the elliptic from the circular, we shall have the relative speed of
collision. It proves to be a half a mile a second or 30 times the
speed of an express train. As such a train brought up suddenly against
a stone wall would certainly elicit sparks, we see that a speed 30
times as great, whose energy is 900 times greater, is quite competent
to a shock sufficient to make us see stars _en masse_. But, indeed,
there must be collisions much more violent than this; both because the
central mass is often much greater and because the orbits differ much
more, and the effect would increase as the square of the speed. The
heat thus generated would cause the meteorites to glow, and at the same
time raise the temperature of the gases in and about them. Furthermore,
the light would come to us through other non-affected portions of gas
between us and the scene of the collision. Thus all three peculiarities
of the spectra stand explained: we have a continuous background of
light due to heated solid meteorites, the bright lines of glowing
gases, and dark lines due to other gases not ignited, lying in our line
of sight.
In addition we should perceive another result. Collisions would be both
more numerous and more pronounced toward the centre of the nebula, for
it must speedily grow denser toward its core owing to the falling in of
meteorites, in consequence of shock. Being denser in the centre, the
particles would there be thicker and be travelling at greater speed.
The nebulæ, therefore, should be brightest at their centres, which is
accordant with observation.
Thus from having offered themselves exemplars of the way in which our
own system came into being, the white nebulæ assert their present
constitution to be that from which we know our system sprang.
Another suggestive fact about the present members of our solar system
which has something to say about a past collision is the densities of
the different planets. The average density of the four inner planets,
Mars, the Earth, Venus, and Mercury is nearly four times that of
the four outer ones Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter [see NOTE
2]. The discrepancy is striking and cannot be explained by size, as
the smallest are the most massive, and if all were primally of like
constitution, should be the least compressed. Nor can it be explained
simply by greater heat tending to expand them, for Neptune and Uranus
show no signs of being very hot. The minor differences between members
of each group are probably explicable in part by these two factors,
mass and heat, but the great gulf between the two groups cannot so
be spanned. We are then driven to the supposition that the materials
composing the outer ones were originally lighter. Now this is precisely
what should happen had all eight been formed by disruption of a
previous body. For its cuticle would be its least dense portion, and on
disruption would travel farthest away, not because of being lighter,
but because of being on the outside. Parts coming from deeper down
would remain near, and be denser intrinsically.
What the present densities of the planets enable us to infer of the
cataclysm from which they came, a remarkable set of spectrograms taken
not long ago by Dr. V. M. Slipher, at Flagstaff, seems to confirm.
The spectrograms in question were made possible by his production of a
new kind of plate. His object was to obtain one which should combine
sufficient speed with great photographic extension of the spectrum
into the red. For it is in the red end that the absorption lines due
to the planets’ atmospheres chiefly lie. With the plates heretofore
used it was impossible to go much beyond the yellow, the C line marking
the _Ultima Thule_ of attent. Not only was it advisable to get more
particularity in the parts previously explored, but it was imperative
to go beyond into parts as yet unknown. After several attempts he
succeeded, the plates when exposed showing the spectra beyond even the
A band. Of their wealth of depiction it is only necessary to say that
in the spectrum of Neptune 130 lines and bands can easily be counted
between the wave-lengths 4600 µµ, 7600 µµ. Of these, 31 belong to the
planet, which compares with 6 found by Huggins, 10 by Vogel, and 9 by
Keeler in the part of its spectrum they were able to obtain.
[Illustration: THE SPECTRA OF THE MAJOR PLANETS.
_Photographed, in 1907, by V. M. Slipher, at THE LOWELL OBSERVATORY
Flagstaff, Arizona._]
The result was a revelation. The plates exposed a host of lines never
previously seen; lines that do not appear in the spectrum of the Sun,
nor yet in the added spectrum of the atmosphere of the Earth, but are
due to the planets’ own envelopes. But this was only the starting-point
of their disclosures. When in this manner he had taken the color
signatures of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, an orderly sequence
in their respective absorption bands stood strikingly confessed. In
other words, their atmospheres proved not only peculiar to themselves
and unlike what we have on Earth, but progressively so according to a
definite law. That law was distance from the Sun. When the spectra were
arranged vertically in ordered orbital relation outward from the Sun,
with that of the lunar for comparison on top, a surprising progression
showed down the column in the strange bands, an increase in number and
a progressive deepening in tint. The lunar, of course, gives us the Sun
and our own air. All else must therefore be of the individual planet’s
own. Beginning, then, with Jupiter, we note, besides the reënforcement
of what we know to be the great water-vapor bands ‘_a_,’ several new
ones, which show still darker in the spectrum of Saturn. The strongest
of these is apparently not identifiable with a band in the spectra
of Mira Ceti in spite of falling near it. Passing on to Uranus, we
perceive these bands still more accentuated, and with them others, some
strangers, some solar lines enhanced. Thus the hydrogen lines stand out
as in the Sirian stars. All deepen in Neptune, while further newcomers
appear.
Thus we are sure that free hydrogen exists in large quantities in
the atmospheres of the two outermost planets and most so in the one
farthest off. Helium, too, apparently is there, and other gases which
in part may be those of long-period stars, decadent suns, in part
substances we do not know.
From the fact that these bands are not present in the Sun and
apparently in no type of stars, we may perhaps infer that the
substances occasioning them are not elements but compounds to us
unknown. And from the fact that free hydrogen exists there alongside of
them, and apparently helium, too, we may further conclude that they are
of a lighter order than can be retained by the Earth.
But now, we may ask, why should these lighter gases be found where they
are? It cannot be in consequence simply of the kinetic theory of gases
from which a corollary shows that the heaviest bodies would retain
their gases longest, because the strange gases are not apportioned
according to the sizes of their hosts. Jupiter, by all odds the biggest
in mass, has the least, and Saturn, the next weightiest, the next
in amount. Nor can title to such gaseous ownership be lodged in the
planet’s present state. For though Jupiter is the hottest and Saturn
the next so, the increased mass more than makes up in restraint what
increased temperature adds in molecular volatility—as we perceive in
the cases of the Sun and Earth.
No; their envelopes are increasingly strange because their internal
constituents are different, and as hydrogen is most abundant in
Neptune, the lightest of all the gases, it is inferable that this
planet’s material is lighter. As distance from the Sun determines
their atmospheric clothing, so distance decides upon their bodies,
too. It was all a case of primogeniture. The light strange matter
that constitutes them was so because it came from the outer part of
the dismembered parent orb. Neptune the outermost, Uranus the next,
then Saturn and Jupiter came in that order from the several successive
layers of the pristine body, while the inner planets came from parts of
it deeper down. The major planets were of the skin of the dismembered
body, we of its lower flesh.
Very interesting the study of these curious spectral lines from the
outer planets for themselves alone; even more so for what one would
hardly have imagined: that they should actually tell us something of
the genesis of our whole solar system. They corroborate in so far what
the meteorites have to say.
That the meteorites are solid and, except for their experiences in
coming through our air, bear no marks of external heat, is a fact
which is itself significant. It seems to hint not at a crash as their
occasioning but at disruptive tidal strains. The parent body appears
to have been torn apart without much development of heat. Perhaps,
then, we had no gloriously pyrotechnic birth, but a more modest coming
into existence. But about this we must ourselves modestly be content to
remain for the present in the dark.
Not the least important feature of the theory I have thus outlined is
that it finishes out the round of evolution. It becomes a conception
_sapiens in se ipso totus, teres atque rotundus_. To frame a theory
that carries one back into the past, to leave one there hung up in
heaven, is for inconclusiveness as bad as the ancient fabulous support
of the world, which Atlas carried standing on an elephant upheld by a
tortoise. What supported the tortoise we were not told. So here, if
meteorites were our occasioning, we must account for the meteorites,
starting from our present state. This the present presentation does.
Thus do the stones that fall from the sky inform us of two historic
events in our solar system’s career. They tell us first and directly
of a nebula made up of them, out of which the several planets were by
agglomeration formed and of which material they are the last ungathered
remains. And then they speak to us more remotely but with no less
certainty of a time antedating that nebula itself, a time when the
nebula’s constituents still lay enfolded in the womb of a former Sun.
Man’s interest in them hitherto has been, as with other things,
chiefly proprietary. Greed of them has grown so keen that legal
questions have been raised of the ownership of their finding, and our
courts have solemnly declared them not “wild game” but “real estate,”
and as such belonging to the owner of the land on which they fall.
But to the scientific eye their estate is something more than “real,”
for theirs is the oldest real estate in the solar system. They were
what they are now when the Earth we pride ourselves in owning was but a
molten mass.
So that when in future you see these strange stones in rows upon a
museum’s shelves, regard them not as rarities, in which each museum
strives to outdo its neighbors by the quantity it can possess, but as
rosetta stones telling us of an epoch in cosmic history long since
passed away—of which they alone hold the key. Look at them as the
literary do their books, for that which they contain, not as the
bibliophile to whom a misprint copy outvalues a corrected one and by
whom “uncuts” are the most prized of all.