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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (March 1, 1896)
10 TME BATTALION tbem , concentrate its heat as it impigned molecule by mole cule upon or about that center of motion ; form her} 7 ' suns of immeasurable dimensions, which, in their turn would throw off from their circumference smaller suns of fluid white-hot consistency ; these, gathering into systems or groups, must take upon themselves astronomical revolutions, the less about the greater ; as the matter grouped itself about separate cen ters of motion, and less fuel was furnished these, they must, by degrees and in proportion to their size, cool down and sol idify into suns, planets, moons, fixed and wandering stars, meteors, nebulae, and star-dust. If, I say, our minds can grasp something of the stretch of time required for this- process, we will see that four, six—yes, a hundred thousand years would be but a drop in the bucket of calculation. The best proof that this gradual process of formation took place and that God did not miraculously “ rush the work ’’ in these early stages of creation, is to be found in the showing of as tronomy now—such processes as I have described being now’ visible in the heavens—and, from the showing of geology, un der the guidance of which we can, as it were, turn back over the history of earth’s history alone, for ages and ages that can hardly be expressed in years. “Give me a rest upon which to stand,” said the old Greek, Archimedes, “and wfith my lever I will move the world.” Give us a starting-point and w T e will in science reconstruct the universe,” said Laplace and" his followers. We have it here—“in the beginning * * earth.” This is the first fact of history, ante-dating, indeed, by millions of years everything we call history; it is the first revelation of Almighty God ; to us the starting-point of time r . and in the incomprehensible grandeur of its statement, it is like God. “ The earth w 7 as without form and void, and dark ness was upon the face of the deep ” “ Without form and void,” in fact, there was no earth. In the beginning earth w T as in the womb of undeve'oped matter, like the oak in the embryo of the buried acorn. And all that vast expanse of at tenuated matter—gaseous, we say, because wo know no higher- state of matter, w r as dark. Darkness w’as its law, and what does that mean to you students of science? Absence of al&