prototypes in
every cubic inch of stagnant water, or ounce of diseased tissue. And
stagnant water is as natural as sterilised water; and diseased tissue is
as natural as healthy tissue. Wholesale murder is Nature's first law.
She creates only to kill, and applies the rule as remorselessly to the
units in a star-drift as to the tadpoles in a horse-pond.

"It seems a far cry from a star-drift to a horse-pond. It is so in
distance and magnitude. It is not in the matter of constituents. In
ultimate composition they are identical. The great nebula in Andromeda
is an aggregation of atoms, and so is the river Thames. The only
difference between them is the difference in the arrangement and
incidence of these atoms and in the molecular motion of which they are
the first but not the final cause. In a pint of Thames water, we know
that there is bound up a latent force beside which steam and
electricity are powerless in comparison. To release that force it is
only necessary to apply the sympathetic key; just as the heated point of
a needle will explode a mine of gunpowder and lay a city in ashes. That
force is asleep. The atoms which could give it reality are at rest, or,
at least, in a condition of _quasi_-rest. But in the stupendous mass of
incandescent gas which constitutes the nebula of Andromeda, every atom
is madly seeking rest and finding none; whirling in raging haste,
battling with every other atom in its field of motion, impinging upon
others and influencing them, being impinged upon and influenced by them.
That awful cauldron exemplifies admirably the method of progress
stimulated by suffering. It is the embryo of a new Sun and his planets.
After many million years of molecular agony, when his season of fission
had come, he will rend huge fragments from his mass and hurl them
helpless into space, there to grow into his satellites. In their turn
they may reproduce themselves in like manner before their true planetary
life begins, in which they shall revolve around their parent as solid
spheres. Follow them further and learn how beneficent Nature deals with
them.

"After the lapse of time-periods which man may calculate in figures, but
of which his finite mind cannot form even a true symbolic conception,
the outer skin of the planet cools--rests. Internal troubles prevail for
longer periods still; and these, in their unsupportable agony, bend and
burst the solid strata overlying; vomit fire through their self-made
blow