What I Believe And Why

, rock, plants, animals?is made up of various combinations of some eighty different elements. The combinations are innumerable, the components are few. These elements have, until lately, appeared to be final, undecomposable. Of them this earth is composed. But these elements, so called, are not elementary. Each element, even the simplest, such as hydrogen, is itself a complex system of vastly smaller atomies called electrons, which move about each other and bump and sometimes escape, possessed of velocities comparable to that of light, yet held together by a force far greater than any other force we can control. There are said to be a thousand of them in one atom of hydrogen. In a space of air not so big as a pea, one part in one hundred thousand is the gas neon, and ofthat neon there are ten million million neon atoms, each one of those atoms composed of perhaps ten thousand electrons, charged with electricity, dancing about in spacious room. This is the wonder of matter, of all the matter we find on the earth. How is it with the stars ? There fall to the earth occasionally from the sky masses of matter, not of the earth, but of the nature outside of the earth. Analysis proves that they are composed of elements such as we are familiar with on the earth, metals, stones such as ours. We then would presume that the nature we do not know is all of it like the nature we do know. But we can be more positive. With the spectroscope, whether a glass lens or a ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.