"The Eternal Life of the Cosmos"
Professor Bickerton in the third and concluding holiday lecture of his course on "Stars and Hiowers" at the Royal Botanic Society's Gardens, spoke of the "wonder stars" of the heavens and of exploding suns, with special reference to new stars, such as Nova Persei_and Nova Aquila, the latter of which was 20,000 times as brilliant as the sun.
There was no doubt at all of their meaning. Two stars had been subject to mutual attraction, and in grazing one another they had formed a cosmic spark, excessively hot. Whenever we saw a new star, he said, we saw an exploded sun. Forty years ago in Naw, Zealand this theory that new stars must be caused by suns striking one another had occurred to him, but although scientific men in England had then declined to accept his views, now it was just beginning to be seen that every other explanation utterly failed to account for the change in colour, the change in spectrum, and other characteristics of new stars.
Some scientific men, he continued. held the dismal doctrine of eternal death, believing in a time when life, as we know it, would be impossible; but instead of that ho believed' there was tthe physical possibility of the eternal life of the cosmos. Our system had been renewed within the last 200,000,000 years, so thab we were part of—a Tejuvenated cosmic system. We came at last to the state in which. we saw that every species, from the climbing anthropoid to homo sapient, was produced not by progressive frightfulness, but~by love, and a number of great biologists were in favour of that view.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.