576. The earths _originated_ for the first time, when they were separated from the primary water. The instant of their precipitation was also the instant of their generation, even as rain is, or rather was, a production of the water. It is easy to say that the earths had been dissolved in the water, and were then precipitated by elective affinities. But it is absurd to rest content with such an assertion. The chief question still remains; how did the earthy originate, before the earth was? Every one can say how that which had already originated, and was only suspended in water, was precipitated. But we are in the habit of distinguishing the several earths, before having taken a survey of matters and inquired if earths then existed. 577. It must not, however, be thought, that all had happened in a gradual manner; that air was first converted into water, and lastly, after a lapse of some thousand years, the latter again into earth, without with the one element the principles conducting to the others being already and necessarily imparted. No, everything has been granted and determined at _one_ stroke, even as with the impregnation of the ovum all the organs of the future embryo are determined, although they first develop themselves gradually. The same agent, which creates the air solicits also its two principles unto combustion in the water; and the same act, which separates the oxygen gas out of the air as water, separates also the carbon from it to constitute earth. Not one can be posited, without the other being codetermined. 578. The analysing principle cannot be a something internal residing in the planet itself. But all that it is, it is through antagonism with the sun. This antagonism is light. This it is that divorces or separates the elements from their matrix; it is light, which has sundered the æther into the twofold air, and the air again into the denser elements, water and earth, separating the oxygen from the nitrogen and later on from the carbon, which must be taken up in water as an oxide. 579. At the commencement of the separation the fluid must be the first to emerge, because the cohesion or fixation of the poles is possible only in a successive manner, yet not as if water were according to its determination to be the first and the Earthy the second in the order of production. As the oxygen separated from the air to create water, so also must the carbon that was left have been precipitated from the water and metamorphosed into earth. Thence and thence only may we venture to say, that the earths originated out of water; for, properly speaking, they arose as absolutely for themselves as air and water; but as air succeeded æther, and water air, so did the earth the water.