Thus, as we have seen, through countless future ages will the sun, with his incandescent envelope of hydrogen, and the planets, with their life-sustaining atmospheres of oxygen, fulfil their appointed times and courses. But if we could conceive that all atmospheres, solar and planetary, were suddenly blotted out and forever annihilated, so that these great orbs thenceforth rolled along as they do now, but only as black globes in an ocean of space of Stygian darkness, new atmospheres would at once begin to be formed, and these would soon again surround the sun and planets, precisely like those which now exist. Sweeping along in darkness, the force of gravity would gather around each of these bodies vast accumulations of aqueous vapor and other gases condensed from the attenuated matter of surrounding space. The planets, by their axial rotations, would again generate from these regions, newly occupied as the system drifted along through space, electrical energy of enormous quantity and potential. Earth would again hear the mighty mandate, "Let there be light," and from her poles to her equator the skies would blaze with brush-light auroras. Suddenly, with a mighty leap, the pent-up currents would flash across to their opposite electric pole, the auroras would gradually die away, and instantly the molecules of hydrogen would begin to sift out at the solar and those of oxygen at the planetary terminals. The electrical currents driving their furious pathway through the rapidly gathering hydrogen envelope, the sun would first begin to faintly flicker with hazy, nebulous light; the light would gather intensity, and soon flash and glow with energy; the solar nucleus within would become intensely heated and liquefied or partially volatilized, and again the solar streams of incandescent heat and light would radiate forth on every side; the commingled gases, oxygen and nitrogen, would once more surround each planetary globe, and we should have a new solar envelope just as we now see it, and new planetary atmospheres like our own; and then, and not till then, would the opposing generative forces permanently counterbalance each other and electrolytic decomposition become practically stationary, except to compensate for the slight variations constantly liable to occur in the complicated running of the mechanism. So the mutilated crustacean re-grows his lost claws, and so our own gaping wounds are healed by the great vis medicatrix naturæ. The most stable of all things is mutually balanced instability; perhaps there is no other form of stability.