“At first the world was all fire, all fire,” he said, spreading his hands above the board, “thick hot mists, so dense that the sun could not shine through, so hot that the rain could not fall as water, but was turned to steam as it came near the white-hot earth. There was no land, and no sea, then. The earth was without form, and void. So hundreds of millions of years went by. “After a long time, so long a time that we cannot even guess how long, the earth began to get a little cooler, and a crust was formed. This was the beginning of land. As yet it was only a shell that vibrated like a boiler-skin, a land bordered on every side by oceans that hissed and steamed.” Antoine swept his hand across the clay, until only the thinnest layer lay on the surface of the board. “So land began,” he repeated. “But the crust was very thin. Even the attraction of the moon, which causes the tides, would rip the crust across, the molten rock would well up through the fissures, and the whole world was a glare with fire shining red and reflected on the low-hung clouds of swirling steam. Every century the skin of land grew slightly thicker, though wrinkled and crumpled by the constant wrench and cleavage, first by the daily tides, then by the spring tides, and at last it remained steadfast, save when the frequent volcanic eruptions and earthquakes cracked the crust across.” “It must have been awfully thin!” exclaimed the listener. “Compared with the size of the earth, that first crust was thinner than a tissue made of spiders’ webs around a baseball,” was Antoine’s reply. “Little by little it grew thicker, however, until parts of it were strong enough to resist the tides. Over these stretches of land, which were the first continents, the radiation of heat grew less, and when the mist from the upper air condensed into rain, it was allowed to fall, instead of being turned into steam, and reached the earth at last, to lie there a bubbling and seething body of water, almost boiling hot. These were the first river and lake systems of the world. All, of course, have gone; the world has been made over, many, many times.” “There was no life then, I suppose?” hazarded the boy. “Not at first, no, no. But, even to-day, tiny one-celled plants have been found living in hot springs (170°) that are not far from boiling point, and it must have been at some early time in that ocean, as it grew cooler, that life began.” “And whereabouts was that first continent?”