The Master turned to me.—–­Don’t think too much of the result of our one experiment.  It means something, because it confirms those other experiments of which it was a copy; but we must remember that a hundred negatives don’t settle such a question.  Life does get into the world somehow.  You don’t suppose Adam had the cutaneous unpleasantness politely called psora, do you?

—­Hardly,—­I answered.—–­He must have been a walking hospital if he carried all the maladies about him which have plagued his descendants.

—­Well, then, how did the little beast which is peculiar to that special complaint intrude himself into the Order of Things?  You don’t suppose there was a special act of creation for the express purpose of bestowing that little wretch on humanity, do you?

I thought, on the whole, I would n’t answer that question.

—­You and I are at work on the same problem, said the Young Astronomer to the Master.—–­I have looked into a microscope now and then, and I have seen that perpetual dancing about of minute atoms in a fluid, which you call molecular motion.  Just so, when I look through my telescope I see the star-dust whirling about in the infinite expanse of ether; or if I do not see its motion, I know that it is only on account of its immeasurable distance.  Matter and motion everywhere; void and rest nowhere.  You ask why your restless microscopic atoms may not come together and become self-conscious and self-moving organisms.  I ask why my telescopic star-dust may not come together and grow and organize into habitable worlds,—­the ripened fruit on the branches of the tree Yggdrasil, if I may borrow from our friend the Poet’s province.  It frightens people, though, to hear the suggestion that worlds shape themselves from star-mist.  It does not trouble them at all to see the watery spheres that round themselves into being out of the vapors floating over us; they are nothing but raindrops.  But if a planet can grow as a rain-drop grows, why then—­It was a great comfort to these timid folk when Lord Rosse’s telescope resolved certain nebula into star-clusters.  Sir John Herschel would have told them that this made little difference in accounting for the formation of worlds by aggregation, but at any rate it was a comfort to them.

—­These people have always been afraid of the astronomers,—­said the Master.—­They were shy, you know, of the Copernican system, for a long while; well they might be with an oubliette waiting for them if they ventured to think that the earth moved round the sun.  Science settled that point finally for them, at length, and then it was all right,—­when there was no use in disputing the fact any longer.  By and by geology began turning up fossils that told extraordinary stories about the duration of life upon our planet.  What subterfuges were not used to get rid of their evidence!  Think of a man seeing the fossilized skeleton of an animal split out of