Heat, such as we cannot imagine, is the chief characteristic of our globe at this stage. But being Afrites, and ourselves made of heat, we shall not mind that. We see that the whirling hot ball has in it all the atoms which will one day become solid rocks. But these atoms are kept apart by heat, and are in a state like gas. As we Afrites peer at the glowing, whirling ball, we see that there are two forces at work within it. Heat is one force, keeping all particles expanded, and not letting them come together; but there is another force called gravitation at work also. This is a force which causes all things to tend toward each other--to draw together. It is this force of gravitation which first gives the gaseous ring its globe shape, pulling its particles together; and as Afrites, we watch with interest the results of this force by long and slow degrees condensing the matter of the globe. While this is going on, we perceive that two great changes are taking place. First, the sphere is growing cooler, by radiating, or throwing off its heat. Heat a poker red hot; wave it in the air, and it cools by giving off its heat to the air. Thus the hot globe throws off some of its heat as it whirls along its path in space. But as the sphere cools, the loss of heat allows the particles to shrink and come together and unite with each other. The uniting of some of these various simple substances produces other substances, and as the cooling and uniting go on, the great globe becomes smaller and smaller. As we are Afrites, and not afraid of heat, we wander into this fluid ball, and we find that by all this cooling, condensing, and uniting, the material for future rocks is forming. Still imagining ourselves Afrites, the next change does not please us as well. We find that the outer particles of vapor in our great hot ball, as they ascend into space and cool, unite with each other and become a vapor like steam, and this steam cools and condenses into rain and mist. If a plate is held before the nose of a tea-kettle from which steam is rushing out, the steam condenses at once into drops of water. If the plate with the water-drops on it is set out in sharply cold winter air, it is at once covered with frost or ice. Thus it happened with the vapor about that hot sphere, our world; and the rain and mist fell back upon the glowing ball from which they had risen. They helped to cool it and to increase the hardening, but they were also reheated and sent off again as vapor, to cool once more in space. If at that time we, as Afrites, had travelled to some other planet, and taken a seat there to watch our world from a distance, we should then have seen it in its greatest beauty as a heavenly body, because in that age it was at its greatest size, and was far larger than now: also it must have shone as a clear and lovely star, with a glory which has now almost passed away.