ds of new and brilliant men.
Faraday, we might have heard of, but Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and the
rest, were names all unknown, as were also the revolutionary ideas,
the conservation and correlation of forces, the substitution of
evolution in the scheme of the universe for the plan of special
creations. Here all unconsciously we were in contact with a man
who was in the thick of the new scientific movement, the friend and
partner in their strivings of the daring new interpreters of the
ways of God to men, and who was to have recognition as a specially
effective apostle of the new dispensation. Abraham himself entertained
his angel no more unawares than we, but gleams of fine radiance
sometimes broke through even to our purblind perceptions. Once
unfurling a quite too long and heedless pair of ears to what I
supposed would be a dull technical deliverance, I found myself
suddenly caught and wonderfully stimulated.

What [said Asa Gray] is the bright flame and vivid
heat that is set free on your hearth when you kindle
your piles of wood? It is the sunlight and sun-heat
of a century ago. The beams were caught in
the wilderness by the leaves of the trees; they were
absorbed and stored in the trunks, and the light
and heat day by day through many years was thus
heaped up. When now combustion begins, it is
simply a setting free of the radiance that was shed
upon the forest many years ago. The noons of a
time long past are making you comfortable in the
wintry storm of the present. So when the anthracite
glows in your grate, you feel the veritable
sunbeams that were emitted aeons upon aeons ago
upon the primeval world. It is the very light that
was drunk in by those most ancient forests. It was
held fast in the trunks, and when those faithful
reservoirs in their turn were crushed and commingled
and drenched until at last they lay under
the earth as the coal beds, they nevertheless held
fast this treasure. When you scratch your match
you but unlock the hoard, and the sunlight of
primeval days, diminished by no particle, glows and
warms once more.

This in substance was Asa Gray's introduction from which he went on
to explain that in the progress of the universe no faintest throb of
energy is lost. It might pass from form to form; heat might appear
as a mode of motion, of weight, of elasticity, but no smallest unit
perished. So the lecture flowed on into a luminous and compr