That the meteorites are solid and, except for their experiences in coming through our air, bear no marks of external heat, is a fact which is itself significant. It seems to hint not at a crash as their occasioning but at disruptive tidal strains. The parent body appears to have been torn apart without much development of heat. Perhaps, then, we had no gloriously pyrotechnic birth, but a more modest coming into existence. But about this we must ourselves modestly be content to remain for the present in the dark. Not the least important feature of the theory I have thus outlined is that it finishes out the round of evolution. It becomes a conception _sapiens in se ipso totus, teres atque rotundus_. To frame a theory that carries one back into the past, to leave one there hung up in heaven, is for inconclusiveness as bad as the ancient fabulous support of the world, which Atlas carried standing on an elephant upheld by a tortoise. What supported the tortoise we were not told. So here, if meteorites were our occasioning, we must account for the meteorites, starting from our present state. This the present presentation does. Thus do the stones that fall from the sky inform us of two historic events in our solar system’s career. They tell us first and directly of a nebula made up of them, out of which the several planets were by agglomeration formed and of which material they are the last ungathered remains. And then they speak to us more remotely but with no less certainty of a time antedating that nebula itself, a time when the nebula’s constituents still lay enfolded in the womb of a former Sun. Man’s interest in them hitherto has been, as with other things, chiefly proprietary. Greed of them has grown so keen that legal questions have been raised of the ownership of their finding, and our courts have solemnly declared them not “wild game” but “real estate,” and as such belonging to the owner of the land on which they fall. But to the scientific eye their estate is something more than “real,” for theirs is the oldest real estate in the solar system. They were what they are now when the Earth we pride ourselves in owning was but a molten mass. So that when in future you see these strange stones in rows upon a museum’s shelves, regard them not as rarities, in which each museum strives to outdo its neighbors by the quantity it can possess, but as rosetta stones telling us of an epoch in cosmic history long since passed away—of which they alone hold the key. Look at them as the literary do their books, for that which they contain, not as the bibliophile to whom a misprint copy outvalues a corrected one and by whom “uncuts” are the most prized of all. CHAPTER III THE INNER PLANETS