-holes, rear mountains from the depths of the sea, then dash them in
pieces.

"Time strides on austere.

"The globe still cools. Life appears upon it. Then begins anew the old
strife, but under conditions far more dreadful, for though it be founded
on atomic consciousness, the central consciousness of the heterogeneous
aggregation of atoms becomes immeasurably more sentient and susceptible
with every step it takes from homogenesis. This internecine war must
continue while any creature great or small shall remain alive upon the
world that bore it.

"By slow degrees the mighty milestones in the protoplasmic march are
passed. Plants and animals are now busy, murdering and devouring each
other--the strong everywhere destroying the weak. New types appear. Old
types disappear. Types possessing the greatest capacity for murder
progress most rapidly, and those with the least recede and determine.
The neolithic man succeeds the palaeolithic man, and sharpens the stone
axe. Then to increase their power for destruction, men find it better to
hunt in packs. Communities appear. Soon each community discovers that
its own advantage is furthered by confining its killing, in the main, to
the members of neighbouring communities. Nations early make the same
discovery. And at last, as with ourselves, there is established a race
with conscience enough to know that it is vile, and intelligence enough
to know that it is insignificant.[1] But what profits this? In the
fulness of its time the race shall die. Man will go down into the pit,
and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which, in
this obscure corner, has for a brief space broken the silence of the
Universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. Life and
death and love, stronger than death, will be as though they never had
been. Nor will anything that _is_ be better or be worse for all that
the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through
countless generations to effect.

[1] From this sentence to the end of the paragraph Brande draws
freely, for the purpose of his own argument, on Mr. Balfour's
"Naturalism and Ethics."--_Ed._

"The roaring loom of Time weaves on. The globe cools out. Life
mercifully ceases from upon its surface. The atmosphere and water
disappear. It rests. It is dead.

"But for its vicarious service in influencing more youthful planets
within its reach, that dead world might as well be loosed at