To pen the history of the solar system and leave out of it all mention of its most transcendentally wonderful result, the chemical evolution attendant upon cooling, would be to play “Hamlet” with Hamlet left out. For the thing which makes the second half of the great cosmic drama so inconceivably grand is the building up of the infinitely little into something far finer than the infinitely great. The mechanical action that first tore a sun apart, and then whirled the fragments into the beautifully symmetric system we behold to-day, is of a grandeur which is at least conceivable; the molecular one that, beginning where the other left off, built up first the diamond and then humanity is one that passes our power to imagine. That out of the aggregation of meteorites should come man, a being able to look back over his own genesis, to be cognizant of it, as it were, from its first beginnings, is almost to prove him immanent in it from the start. Fortunate it is that his powers should seem more limited than his perceptions, and the more so as he goes farther, else he had been but the embodiment of conceit. We must sketch, therefore, the steps in this marvellous synthesis; hastily, for I have already spoken of it elsewhere in print and repetitions dull appreciation,—in the appreciative,—though we have the best of precedents for believing that, even in science, to be dull and iterative insures success; the dulness passing for wisdom and the iteration tiring opposition out. In the Sun all substances are in their elemental state. Though its materials are the same as the Earth’s, we should certainly not feel at home there, even if we waived the question of comfort, for we should recognize nothing we know. We talk glibly of elements as if we had personal acquaintance with them, man’s innate snobbery cropping out. For to the chemist alone are they observable entities. No one but he has ever beheld calcium or silicon, or magnesium, or manganese, and most of us would certainly not know these everyday elements if we met them on the street. Of all the substances composing the Earth’s crust, or the air above, or the water beneath, practically the only elements with which we are personally familiar are iron, copper, and carbon, and these only in minute quantities and in that order of acquisition; which accounts for the stone, iron, and bronze ages of man, ending we may add with the graphite or lead-pencil age of early education.