Outlines of Swedenborg's Cosmology

Such are the qualities, the predicates, the rank, the office, of the human spirituous fluid or soul as given in the Economy, the Animal Kingdom, and the Principia. Such in the succession from the Infinite is the rank, office, and predication of the primal aura in the scheme of God's creation of the universe.

This human spirituous fluid, in its circling outgo and return, outlines all the vessels and structures of the four degrees of human faculties.⁸³ It is not a brain, nor a fibre, tissue or membranous structure, or a mind, but it is verily a fluid, a blood, and thus Swedenborg calls it an essence. It is above imagination. It partakes of Life. It is far above the "anatomical sphere." It is the motive and determinant principle, the life and essence of all our human form.⁸⁴ Swedenborg says, "words fail us to express what it is, for words are taken from a lower sphere." Still we must use words; and the use of the term fluid or blood marks a necessary distinction, since we know the distinction between a fluid and its vessel, or between blood and tissue, between the content and the containant.

This is the most eminent fibril or tunic, wonderful beyond measure or imagination, which transmits the human formative substance, the human spirituous fluid; and from which all other forms and substances of the human organism, sensitive or motor, receive the form of their existence.

This is the human faculty, the supra-mental faculty, the celestial, which the human soul forms first,the celestial cortex founded in the first aura as the eye is founded in the ether, or the ear is founded in the air, as the universal human is founded in God. And because this is the first form of the human, which the Lord creates after the very soul itself, without which no other human organic is determined, no cortical glands, no fibres, nor weaving body,⁹⁰ therefore, this inmost or celestial cortex may be called the first organic, or membranous human plane, where finite bounded man first begins to be man, existent, objectized, recipient. This also is given in the father's seed.⁹¹

Since this celestial faculty, this inmost human cortex, exists in all human beings in the universe, the way to it may be opened,⁹² and man may live the celestial life, or belong to the celestial heaven. And as the first aura, in which the life of this cortex is founded, is one and universal for all earths and solar systems of the created universe, so all men from all earths, in whom this degree of the human organism is opened, dwell in one common heaven.⁹³

This simple cortex, or simple cortical substance is the truly celestial form.⁹⁴ It is the simplest, purest, most eminent of all the organs, and at the same time the supreme sensitive and compositive of the human form.⁹⁵ It is, as a faculty, as wise in the embryo as in the adult and the sage.⁹⁶

In all the operations of the cerebellum, and in the cerebrum itself during sleep, every force begins in the simple cortex, the celestial organic, or pure intellect. A defect alone of instrumental causes, or intermediates, hinders its full act in the cerebrum, during waking hours.⁹⁷ It cannot be instructed from below or from the outside, for it is already full of the arcana of nature and the created universe.⁹⁸ It presents already simultaneously in itself, all that the middle mind, or the rational, will ever attain to successively.⁹⁹ It is called the pure intellectory or intellect, which mediates between the soul itself, and the mind, or understanding, the rational.

It would seem therefore to be that intellectual referred to in A. C. 1495. where the warning is given not to proceed from scientific and rational truths to the celestial, without intellectual truths as media.

This celestial or super-rational form and cortex, then, is that most holy place and degree, in man, viewed as a little tabernacle for the Divine, where the ark of the covenant of life abides; and God alone is the light thereof.

The soul builds this plane answerable to the primal aura; but there are four successive atmospheres, or auras, which are as it were the four apartments of the Divine Proceeding, as the Tabernacle in the universe, where God appoints to meet with man. To these four atmospheres are formed, or in them are founded, as many successive fibrous or membranous planes in man, the celestial, the rational or intermediate mind, the natural sensory and the physical itself. But the full consideration of these must be reserved for a future occasion; and so let us return to the general subject of the auras themselves.

For this reason the celestial heaven, which is founded in the first and universal atmosphere of creation, is one heaven. But the spiritual heaven, which is founded in the second aura, is not one but many; it consists of as many heavenly societies, or heavens, as are the number of the starry suns of creation;¹⁰² each society or heaven thereof being founded in a specific volume and vortex of second aura, generated by and around its own star or sun. Thus as the first aura is answerable to the highest or inmost place of the tabernacle where God is the sufficient light thereof, the second aura may stand as the holy place, the second room of the tabernacle heavens, where the candles of the stars give light.

For natural suns as we see them are double suns. The Spiritual Sun is their centre and soul, the very active central space within; and fiery least metallic substantials are their body. The two act as one sun. From this origin all things are double. As men we live in a double world, the spiritual and the natural; we are double men, having a soul and a body. All things that exist in the world of effects are double things, having as it were a soul and a body, or a spiritual cause and a natural effect, or a spiritual active center and a natural envelope or body, which act together as one cause. It is thus that the law of correspondence arises.

Moreover, the first and second successive, constituting the two radiant belts below the Spiritual Sun, do not afford materials sufficing for the stiffer envelopes of the larger bullae of the second aura For them some substantiate or finites, more highly compounded still, are requisite; some new finites of larger mass, lowered velocity, and widened circle of motion.* These are the third finites, formed by compression and composition of the particles or bullae of the first aura; which together with the fourth finites form the mass of the natural sun as seen by our eyes, that is, the mass of the fiery metallic shell or envelope around the active centre of the Spiritual Sun within.

But the greater the accommodation, the more narrowed the range of outgoing action. Hence the Spiritual Sun, acting into and from a sun or star, as an enveloping body, does not extend its influence far. Hence many natural suns are required in the universe to develop volumes of second aura. There are thus as many volumes of second atmospheres or aura, as the number of the stars in the sky; each volume being developed about its parent star, and localized about it for its very maintenance; and each volume of the second aura, as we have said, is the ground and habitat of one society of the she spiritual heaven dwell interiorly of the expanse of the second aura. For "although the expanse around the Sun of the angelic heaven is not an extense, still it is in the extense of the natural sun, and with the subjects there according to their form."¹⁰³

Now as this second aura differs somewhat in every solar system of the created universe, it is evident that the correlated plane in man, the intermediate human, the rational, is framed in and to the second aura of the individual solar system, upon one of whose earths he is brought forth, grows, and is educated; and that all the form and genius,—individual and social,—of that solar system, with all its peculiar features, will be stamped upon him.¹⁰⁴ The result would be so markedly different, that men of two solar systems could scarcely understand each other.¹⁰⁵ And it is evident that, after death, a man who goes only to the spiritual heaven, which is founded in this second aura, will remain in relation with the volume of the second aura around that particular sun, under whose rays he was born. For only there do those live who are of like genius with himself; and only in the range and sphere of that partcular vortex can he abide, and be free and at home.

For the units of the gray or cortical glandular forms of the human organic mind are built to the size of the bullae of the second aura, and natively expand and contract in sympathetic rhythm and consonance therewith; that is, they expand and contract with the animatory pulsation of the natural sun of their own solar system.

Herein follows a marvel! Even as the myriads of cortical glandules in the microcosmic man, so in the Grand Man is the number, the order, the situation, and relation of the societies of the spiritual heaven; and the same is the number, the order, the connection of the starry suns of creation, and their vortices about them. Hence the order and situation of the suns and their solar systems in the universe, are as the order and situation of the cortical glandules which form in their complex the intermediate and proper faculty of man.¹⁰⁶ Therefore it is that the Lord from creation, foreseeing the number of such units of the second order or degree, which would be necessary to fill the human form of that degree, provided even from the first of creation for as many suns or stars.

These innumerable starry suns with their vortices are linked each with each in a stupendous order and form, connecting throughout the universe. And Swedenborg says that no change can happen in one which is not perceived in all the others.¹⁰⁸ Nor is the form ever full and closed. Stars as yet latent may blaze forth. Ever new forms, new heavens and new earths, may arise carrying the human creation to fuller and more varied perfection without end.

The Economy notes that an understanding of degrees is basic to the knowledge and recognition of correspondence;¹¹⁰ and we learn therefrom how derivative forms are concreted, formed, and maintained, from the substance of a plane, older, finer, more fluid, and more active, and at the same time more universal, more all-embracing, than the derivative, posterior, more compounded, and more ultimate degrees.¹¹¹ Also how these new and more finited forms, although consubstantiate with the higher and prior plane, shall be in quality and determination so distinct from that prior, that they deserve to receive a new and distinct name,¹¹² and become a substance that exists as it were by itself. The doctrine of degrees then exhibits the very ladder of universal creation;¹¹³ and the understanding of it teaches the very nature of order in the actual successions and subordinations of creation.

"We rarely entertain a distinct idea of degrees."—We think of discrete degrees as if they were something that existed eternally. But according to Swedenborg degrees are finite things, and have come about by finiting processes and definite laws. They were made, and can be conceived as unmade. In the organic world discrete degrees are actually at every instant made and unmade, compounded and resolved. At every round of the transcendent circulation of the three-fold human blood, there is a perpetual descent and ascent according to degrees, and this most distinctly and discretely.

Moreover, the history of the rise, succession, and the correspondential relations of the four auras or atmospheres of the universe, is the making of the great elemental series of four degrees, distinct, discrete, extended in the universe as the tabernacle of the heavens with its four distinct apartments.

Now when a posterior or more finited degree is to be brought into existence, the substance of the prior degree, by means of flowing currents in its volume, outlines and delineates the form, or faculty, about to be created. This representation of the yet unborn posterior in the prior, extends, Swedenborg says, as a cause to all causates, both in the kingdom of the auras, and in the animal body.¹¹⁶ And after the posterior is constructed as an individual form or plane, the flowing currents of the prior, which delineated the posterior or secondary form, still hold the second form together, and maintain it perpetually.

The lines of the pattern, thus primarily represented in the prior substance, are afterwards as it were infilled with entia, bullae, particles, or finites, proper to the degree of the plane to be produced, having been first formed from the prior degree by composition and compression. These myriads of infilling particles are then held together in the flowing matrix of the superior plane which surrounds and encompasses them.

Whatever be the potency of the units or substantiates in themselves, so soon as they enter with others into the construction of a more finited and concrete form, their active potency is finited to the general choral march or gyre of the form of which they are now part and parcel. There remains in the substance but the effort and the intuitive instinct to endeavor back again, to ascend again to the source from which it set forth; and thus operate an inner endeavor to resolve the form of which it is part, and ascend even by the death of that form to its own purer and higher degrees; especially if the ultimate form becomes non-correspondent to the ends of creation, to the reception of the Divine, and cooperation. in the service of its uses. It seems to have been from this action of the Divine endeavor in ultimates, that the antediluvian race was corporeally destroyed at the time of the flood.

It is, indeed, a common law of spiritual compound form, that whatever may be the power of action of the primal units or substantiate in themselves, in their own prior plane, whenever they unite together to frame compound forms of a lower character and degree, their action is then limited and defined to the form and plane of which they now make a part; there remaining only a conatus to resolve and ascend to the higher degree.

A celestial man loses his wisdom when he descends to a lower plane; and the human spirituous fluid,—in which resides per se a range of knowledge and of action commensurate with creation, when its substance is mated with etherial and aerial salts and compounded into the red blood, lives but a common and obscure life.¹¹⁸ In it, during the stage of its composition as red blood, there remains only the endeavor towards resolution through the walls of the capillaries,—the endeavor towards the death of its composite form, by the laying down of the inert copulating salts, and thereby its own freeing, separation, resolution, ascent and return to its pristine activity and life.

Indeed, the death of the outer body as a whole, and at the same time the resurrection to higher planes of knowledge and life, is but a laying down at once en masse, of all the salts and inert particles in the blood, and from the blood in the tissues. By that death the human spirituous fluid ascends and returns to its own full human life together with the simplest fibre which is released with it, in all its complex of organism, the latter being conditioned according to the modification of its form, stamped by the habit of individual mental life, and carrying with it such and so much of the subtle spheres, given off by lower organic planes of the mind and their activities, as have contributed to its own opening and infilling.

The story of the formation, then, of a human organism at birth, by successive compositions of the spirituous fluid or human internal, and the re-ascent at death, is exactly the story of the circle of descent by discrete degrees of compounding, and ascent by degrees of death or lying down or resolution, which is repeated momentarily in the course of the transcendent circulation of human internal to ultimate effect, form, and use, and back again to its origin and source.

The Principia instructs us therefore as to the true mode and manner of the formation of discrete degrees, in the story of the successive formation of finites from their first origin in the Spiritual Sun, by successive stages of composition even to the ultimates of nature. The Writings repeat the same story in general, summing together the details that are given in the Principia.¹²⁰

Chapter III. Natural Suns And Planets.

The internal of natural suns is a pure active space of the Spiritual Sun, together with the first active proceedings or radiant belts from it. This internal exists primitively as a vast and apparently vacuous abyss, but a spherical abyss of living force, surrounded by the foam structure of the universal aura.

This vast sun-internal or star soul is in a perpetual animatory motion,¹²¹ a most eminent cardiac and pulmonic motion which God Man acts from Himself into the forms of universal creation.¹²² Therefore, the origin of this motion is living, supremely living, since it is from the life and action immediately from God Man Himself.

In this internal are the seeds of suns and solar systems, and the volume of the universal aura is as the common mother by which all suns and worlds are produced. Thus the enveloping body of suns is taken from the matrix or mother.. This body presents itself in the shape of a sort of double radiant envelope, composed of volumes of third and fourth finites. These latter are the primitives of the finer and grosser members of the metallic family in nature.

When the internal or Spiritual Sun has at length formed such a body about itself, it thereafter acts its animatory motion into its own enveloping body; and that envelope, receiving this animatory motion, in turn acts from itself a derivative animatory motion;¹²⁷ even as we are taught that an internal or soul always acts into and upon its body, and the body then acts from itself. This derivative animatory motion is of a slower rhythm, more bounded and finited, and of far greater breadth of difference between expansion and constriction. Thus it is able to act upon and affect large, gross, less elastic bullae, and to reduce the more non-living forms into sympathetic reciprocations and expansions, such as the fine animations of the pure spiritual centre or Spiritual Sun itself cannot do; even as a nerve cannot act upon a stone immediately, but only by means of its grosser body or instrument, a muscle.

Suns are thus bodied about with an envelope of something like a flamy metallic vapor, the splendor of which we see as fire. This flamy fire in its substantiates is the very beginning of what we may call the natural. The third and fourth finites which constitute it are in a primal freedom of activity beyond earthly comparison. But as a whole this envelope is under an equilibrium of pressure from the activity of the Spiritual Sun within and the reacting aura without which condenses, presses, and steadies it, almost into a viscous mass. This is where metallic primitives have their rise and origin, and what Swedenborg teaches of the primitive metallic nature of the fiery envelope of the sun has been observed by the spectrum.

First and second substantiate, the finites which constitute the two radiant belts below the Spiritual Sun, are framed immediately from the primitives of that Sun, by means of their own conflowing and conglobation. They arise directly from the Spiritual Sun, belong to the whole universe, and are framed into the bullular structure of the universal aura. The latter is thus of the very essence of the Spiritual Sun.

Since the fifth finites originated strictly at the surface of the planets, and began to be formed there only when the planets were at a great distance from the sun, none of the derivatives of the fifth finites can be formed in the enveloping body of the sun. This fact, viz., that the primitives of the sixth and seventh periodic families of chemistry exist in the vicinage of the planets, and not in the envelope of the sun, has been independently discovered within the last generation by the aid of the spectroscope. The reason why the sun is without these elements so common upon the earth, on any supposition that the earth mass was itself part of the common belt of the sun, is one of the puzzles of modern research. Swedenborg gives the clue to its cause, in his teaching as to the origin of the primitives of the metallic families immediately about the solar center, and the origin of the larger, grosser primitive substantiates, as those of the oxygen-sulphur and halogen families, about the planets.

The first substantiate or finites, which form the active center of the primal aura particle, and which escape on the compression of this particle, are for the most part eventually compounded or brought together to form second substantiate active, and very many of them enter the internal active space of a sun. For second and first substantiate can move without mutual interference in the same field, if the space is not confined.⁹

The third grade of finites or substantiate thus come into existence by compression of the foam substance of the primal aura. They are the first of the finites to be formed by the instrumentality of compression. They possess the same vortex ring figure as the first and second. They have the like vortico-spiral internal circulation, and the like conatus and potency of spontaneous activity and orbital motion; but of a lessened velocity and a wider orbit. Their interior texture is relatively coarse and comparatively open.

These third finites are produced in innumerable volumes about the primitive internal of a solar center. Of them is formed the enveloping body of a sun. They always remain in the envelope as a part of it. They never enter the internal space of higher power. Their entrance is guarded against by the very coarseness of their texture. They are a discrete degree below, and, as we have seen, Nature properly begins with them.

1. Where masses of the envelope were rounded into simple balls, the solid planets were formed.
2. Where the outer side of the envelope curled over outwards, and conglobated like a thick envelope round a sort of nucleus of the aura of the vortex, the non-solid fluctuant satellites came into existence.
3. Where the inner passive dense crust was driven outward by the expansive force of the active center, the edges of its broken fragments curled over and globed about masses of the inner solar space, forming great expansile bullae like pseudo suns. These are the vast solar bubbles or sun spots, sure to burst as soon as the outside pressure lessens.

Sufficiently immense for this threefold use was the primal mass of the first bodiment of the sun. In the epoch after the formation and breaking up of the first dense envelope, the body of the sun was formed again for its age-long uses. And again the epochal story of the period of compression and disruption is rhythmically told in tensions and releases of twelve year periods. But never again does the solar envelope grow so thick and stiff that it ceases to vibrate, and darkens the sun; nor ever again does it attain to anything like the thickness adequate to the making of planetary masses. Only at periods is the surface tossed; magnetic storms of irregular current stream in the vortex; and the new sun-spots, taking birth and origin on the inner side of the envelope, make their way through, until, as they touch a less dense region, they break, like the vast bubbles they are; and toss their films of metallic fire into the plane of the vortex volume about the sun's equator, there to add their quota to the meteoric dust, shining in that far region like moths in a sunbeam; and in the long ages giving rise to the lens-shaped ray of that serene fairy illumination we call the zodiacal light.

These resistant solid globes, though spherical, are yet flattened at their poles, the reasons for which we may here briefly consider.

Since primitive earths are made of substantiate or finites; since finites of every grade have a vortex-ring configuration, and a conatus to circulo-spiral motion; since finites of such figure can be more closely packed when they are set in orderly arrangement, flattened pole to flattened pole; since this is the arrangement into which they bring themselves when greatly crowded and in sufficient volume; since around the starry suns the vast masses of fourth finites find themselves under the required conditions of mutual pressure; and since the finites composing these immense globular masses will arrange themselves in such rouleaux, pole to pole; therefore, the result will be a vast ball emulating the flattened discoid shape of the constituent finites. The primitive earth mass thus became as it were a huge image of the finites entering into its composition. And it is worthy to be noted as remarkable, that the close set rouleaux of finites, though compacted into such a mass, yet carry on a slow oppressed circulation, from an inherent conatus to it which is retained even in the dark moveless condensation of its core. By virtue of this fact, the great globes as a whole have in them a striving to an orbital motion of their own, emulous of the circulo-spiral orbit in which the finites themselves run.

The single finites possess native orbits of small diameters, inconceivably small. But the earth mass images of finites have native orbits of millions of miles; the orbit being proportioned to the size of the body. Therefore, the great earth masses, solid, resistant all through, are yet emulous finites or substantiate, and have in themselves the conatus and power of running forever in an orbital circulo-spiral path.

If such bodies pass from the vicinage of the sun, outwards along the lines of its revolving vortex, to a situation where the pressures of the surrounding ether-foam are less, to a situation where the aura around them is more rarefied than near the sun, no abrupt or disastrous consequences can befall them. For instance, they cannot explode, since this does not happen to solid bodies. The only thing that can happen to them, on coming to a region of less density, is that the layers of finites on their immediate surface will tend to free themselves, and, in clouds like vapor from the water, will rise, circle, and curl about the solid surface of the planets.

The part which these freed streams of fourth finites play will be taken up in the later study of the formation about each planet of two terrestrial atmospheres, the third and fourth discrete degrees in the atmospheric series, or the third and fourth auras, which are the ether and the aerial elementary.

The primitive earth masses, as we have said, were formed in the midst of the thickest portions of the ring or belt around the sun, when its substance fell in together upon itself. But on the outer side of that belt, away from the solar center, facing towards the outer space, another type of body, the satellite, is formed. When the great encrusting belt is broken, the vortex pressing inward tends to catch great sheets of the viscous metallic matter, and bend them inward, so that they belly in toward the sun like great sails. These great belying sheets, by virtue of their viscous state, and the proneness of all their constituent finities to press towards circling orbits of motion, will tend to drop their edges together, to meet, to close about the volume of the vortex aura caught within it. The result will be the formation of a vast hollow cosmic ball, consisting of a more or less thick crust or envelope of fourth finites which enclose a great volume of the second aura. Nor will these new bodies have a polar flattening as the planets have, but will be perfectly round by reason of the equal pressure extended in every direction by the enclosed elastic bullae. Such are the satellites, according to Swedenborg.

Thus arise great cosmic bodies, hollow, with enveloping crusts of metallic primitives, surrounding fiery active high-pressure centers of second substantiate. They are thus vast cosmic bubbles arising at the junction of the star center with its enveloping crust or girdle; and their state is necessarily that of bombs highly charged. And so soon as the wheeling vortex carries them out of the region of condensation pressure, they have in their constitution the inevitable conditions of instant expansion and explosion. Such are the bodies to which the phenomena of sun spots are due, according to Swedenborg.¹⁴⁹

Gathered up by the aura-flow, they swing at first round and round the sun in the plane in which they were formed; but little by little, at every circling round, their wheeling motion enlarges its diameter; and they are imperceptibly carried away from the region where they were formed, where the outside pressures are great, to regions where the aura about them is less compressed, less dense, more and more rarefied.

During this progress from the center of the vortex, not much can happen to the genuine planets, the resistent solid masses of the primitive earths. They will grow smaller as they go, in proportion as the outer layers of their materia are lifted and wound off, in the weaving of their enveloping garments of third and fourth ether. This we have already indicated, and shall return to it in detail.

With the satellites a different possibility comes into play. Satellite forms, as we have seen, are shell-like crusts of viscous metallic primitives enclosed around a volume of the vortex-ether, the second or magnetic aura which makes the vortex of each sun, or solar system.

Now when forms of such constitution are borne outward to regions where the surrounding volume of second aura is under less pressure and more rarefied, then, in proportion as the volume of second aura outside the shell of the satellite is lessened, the volume of second aura inside the satellite will expand, or strive to do so. until it is in the same state of density as the aura outside. So long as the crusting substance is viscous, this will lead only to a gradual enlargement of the satellite, as it travels away from the vicinage of the sun. And if the crust is thick enough and yielding enough, to accommodate itself to the strain without breaking, nothing further will happen. But if the outer crust grows too thin in places, or too stiff to yield, vents will be opened in the crust like safety valves, permitting sufficient of the inner volume of aura to escape, in order to equalize the pressure of the aura without and the aura within. In that case, the crust of the satellite will probably wrinkle back, puckered and folded, like an apple when half its juice has evaporated from it. This seems to be what has happened to our moon, judging by its appearance.

There is, too, always a possibility that these opening vents and cracks may be so large, and so abruptly made, that the whole crust of the satellite will break up into a dozen pieces; in which case there would no longer be any satellite, but there would be a dozen little asteroids or meteors, swarming and swimming around on the tide of the vortex,

The opening of vents in the crust of a satellite would not militate against the existence of human beings upon it. The satellites are embosomed in the auras, which bathe them about and touch them on every side; and wherever the auras are, there is life, and formative life.

The substance of the satellite crust is of the mineral kingdom, and sends out continual radio-emanations in impalpable clouds. Wherever these are, there exist the substances out of which the life-formative fashions to itself bodies of use. Given, therefore, the life-formative of the foam auras, and the radio-emanent spheres of the mineral kingdom, vegetation can begin. And when vegetation once begins, new radio-emanent spheres or clouds of effluvia are sent forth from this new kingdom, providing thereby for the next grand stage, the creation of the animal kingdom. It is literally thus that creation does begin on any planet, and so does it climb from clod to plant, from plant to beast and man. There needs to be first but the life-formative, the living auras, as the active; and for its passive the stuff and substance of the satellites and planets, with their radio-emanent spheres of particles, indefinitely ponderable, but capable of being organized into forms of use by the inflowing and encompassing auras. And we would note in addition a remarkable fact, that when such a sphere has been given forth from an organic form, the sphere remains even though the parent form itself dies. The oxygen salt, volatile, aerial, which the plant gave off last year, the animals breathes to-day. Thus do the living auras, framing vegetative bodies from the radio-emanations of the mineral kingdom, prepare for animal and human life upon the earth; and thus do we see imaged in nature itself immortal life and immortal use in a higher sphere, after the original form is dead.

The supremely human formative, the first or celestial aura, is universal; and thus prior to suns and systems. The second aura must also come into existence, before the satellites and planets can be created, for these exist by the compression of the particles of that aura. They are, in fact, afloat in it, carried on its solar tide. The third aura, the vegetable formative, begins to be woven about the satellites and planets, as soon as they leave the sun. The aerial elementary follows next in the series. Then water. Then the stuff of the mineral kingdom, the very earth crust of the planet or satellite.

All these are now at hand and ready for vegetation to begin; and as soon as it begins, the planets and satellites begin to give off, into the interstices of the aerial elementary, spheres of inert, angular particles, indefinitely ponderable, which are the primitives of the whole family of oxygen and sulphur, and on down the list. Nothing more is needed, one might almost say, but the dust of a world, and the living hands of the bullular auras to conjoin that poor dust to their own vital motions; nothing more is needed but the unition of the passive of the earth's crust to the active of the auras, a salt to a bullular form, and the framing, of these two into a concrete unit, reactant to the Divine, able to bring forth therefrom spheres for present and for future use; for the sphere remains, as we have said, even though the parent form itself was broken long ago.

The Satellites, finally, as we have shown, are bodies of a bubble constitution,—not the constitution of a bubble or bulla with an active self-directive center, as the bullae of the auras, but with an atmospheric or passive center, their crust enclosing a volume of the second aura. This bullular constitution of the satellites seems to account for their behavior in their relation with the planets.

A body of such a constitution, variable and elastic within, cannot serve as an object upon which the pressures of a surrounding sphere concenter, able to react to them as a stable fulcrum, such as the unyielding solid planets are; thus they cannot remain stably in place, as a pure passive subject of converging pressures; nor are they able as little suns to serve as the active soul or parent of a developing system. This relegates them, for their freedom and their existence, to occupy the circumambient sphere of some other center.

Chapter IV. The Natural Atmospheres And Water.

This type of compressive force can only affect planetary bodies and their immediate vicinage; and their own surrounding volumes of third and fourth aura are the ministering means of the compression. This compression commenced at the period when the two terrestrial atmospheres, already fully formed, began to be carried by their mother earth farther and farther from the genial circle of greater solar light and heat. For as the mother earth carried them into regions continually further remote and more chill, they themselves began to contract as they cooled; and not only did they thus contract individually or as to every bullular unit, but as a whole or en masse. Then the force of the progressive cooling and constriction of so vast a volume of ether, everywhere directed by narrowing radii inward upon the parent earth, began to produce great and wonderful results.

The earth-globe itself could not be further compressed by the contractive pressures of the cooling volume of ether thus determined, and as it were focussed, upon its surface. For the globe was already absolutely dense and resistant; nor could it be thrust from its position, since it lay as it were sustained on all sides by centripetal pressures and equal force.

Under the growing pressure, then, of the whole contracting volume, the elastic bullae of the fourth aura, near the surface of the earth, grew denser and denser, smaller and smaller; until vast volumes of them were reduced to small, hard, non-bullu¹ar, spherical masses, resistant, and inert.¹⁹²

There was formed at length a vast sea of such water particles, miles in depth, fluent about the planetary mass. This was the great unsalted sea, or primeval ocean, which first swept around the globe.¹⁹⁴

Plate VIII represents nine molecules of water, the central molecule being the first to yield to the pressure. As its envelope, composed of fifth finites, must be the first to give way, its substance will pass into the adjacent interstitial spaces, shown in plate IX, and the adjoining round water molecules settling closer in upon the crushed and yielding particle, it will be pressed into the shape shown in plate X; this shape will be composed of a central cubic block, consisting of the nuclear core of the original water particle,a cubic block, therefore, of metallic primitives. At each angle of this central cube will be a tetrahedron block, formed of the fifth finites from the surface of the compressed particle of water. This cubic block, Swedenborg terms an alkaline particle; the tetrahedral blocks are acid particles. Therefore the primeval sea salt, as a compound of both forms, the alkaline and the acid, is basic.

This fits them to connect with any kind of round particles of suitable size, in a sort of ball and socket fashion. It is in this manner that the crystallization of salt takes place; the round molecular particles, necessary to build up the structure of the crystalline mass, being furnished by the water of crystallization.¹⁹⁸

These complex angular particles, thus formed at the bottom of the ocean, are the very primitives of the halogen salts and other typical bases. As they were actually formed in situ at the bottom of the sea, from water particles, and among water particles, they were formed most perfectly and most abundantly. The water particles left uncrushed among them, acted the part of the water molecules of crystallization. The result was the formation of a vast layer of rock salt at the bottom of the sea.¹⁹⁹ This was the last great effect of the contractive pressure of the cooling ether volume.

It was by the wash from this substratum of crystalline salt that the great primeval sea of sweet water grew salt, and is to this day the salt-mother of the earth and storehouse of the basic angular particles of creation.

These ramenta are formed of finer finites than the main mass, disintegrated from the coarser, which exist in some near interstice. Every angular or block particle formed in that deep crystalline bed of salt in the depths of the primeval sea, was thus delicately winged at its edges. As the sea dissolved layer after layer of the salt particles, these delicate lamellar portions were broken off by the attrition of that process; and clouds as it were of them must have been loosened, freed, and drifted to and fro in the water of the deep sea.

Now in the depths of the primal sea, in the plane where the bed of rock salt was dissolving, the conditions, the necessary factors for the formation of the primal oils, or hydro-carbons, and the formative substance or seed of vegetative life, not only existed, but existed abundantly, and existed in juxtaposition. The attrition of the primal keen-edged perfect salts as they dissolved must have given rise to a vast first production of such free ramental particles; the tendency of which is to attach themselves to any free ether bullae or volumes adjacent.

For the salt particles dissolving in water, do not increase the volume of water, because they only fill and occupy the interstices of the water particles.—Therefore, as the salt of the rock-salt bed dissolves in the wash of the primal sea resting upon it, the interfluent ether, or "subtle matter" rises to the surface in the shape of bubbles; and its place is occupied by the salts.²⁰⁵ Thus all through the lower level of the sea where the dissolving salt is giving rise to a cloud or sphere of ramental particles, the volumes of displaced ether will be rising among them and mounting to the surface in bubbles. It was thus that oils or hydrocarbons first originated in the primal sea.

Moreover, some of the ramental fragments, carried above the surface of the sea and dispersed there by the breaking of bubbles, would readily transfer themselves to the interstices of the elementaries, and gather and encrust about the bullular particles of the watery vapor, formed in the lower layers of the warm, heavy brooding air pressing the surface of the sea. The latter form is carbonic acid, the "volatile urinous salt" of Swedenborgs's Chemistry; formed also of the exhalations sent out in the course of the purification of the sera of the bloods in the lungs.²⁰⁸

This first crust, almost liquid, delicately jelly-like, an oily visco-fluid foam superinduced over the surface of the warm quiet sea,—was formed then of bullae of the ether, the atmosphere of the third order, encrusted and clothed about with the finest passive angular particles, the curving ramental edges of the primitive broken salts; these ramental edges being broken away, in the depth of the sea, in the throb and slide of its motion over the rock-salt bed; and as the solid planet and liquid ocean revolve, it lifted and dissolved layer after layer of the great salt stratum formed in its depths.

Thus the first crust collecting over the warm primal salt sea, the first ground formed, was composed as it were of such little bullular ova, involving the very vital formatives of the vegetable life, and was as it were a soil of pure seed.

The great mountains of salt, and the beds of rock-salt of the salt mines, are for the most part remnants of that great first bed of rock-salt formed in the depth of the primeval sea, the undissolved remnants being in later ages covered over and preserved by deposited strata of other matter.²¹²

Now, as it happened at the first age of the earth, swiftly under the solvent action of the water, that the delicate ramental particles were detached from the fine cubes and triangles, and, adjoining themselves to the bullae or bubbles of the ether, gave origin to the first forms of oils or hydro-carbons; so later it happened, and happens still, in the rock-salt mines, but more slowly. And the action of this primal production of the oils is being paral¹eled in the buried rock-salt beds, but on a smaller sca¹e, and more slowly. Ramental particles are detached by slow attrition, escape and attach themselves to the adjacent bullae of the ether, both singly and in litt¹e volumes, until stores of such loaded bullae, the hydro-carbons or oils of the mineral kingdom, are formed in the dark caverns and strata of the earth and accumulate in great pockets or wells among the adjacent pervious strata. Bitumen, asphalt, naptha, petroleum, are instances of such forms thus produced.²¹⁸

This accounts for the fact, of so much interest to practical men, that inflammable gas is usually found in connection with beds of rock-salt. In a great salt mine in China, as well as in salt deposits in Hungary, gas is obtained directly from the beds of rock-salt. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, article on Gas.)

Moreover the Encyclopaedia Britannica, article on rock-salt, notes that "the frequent association of bitumen and petroleum, with rock-salt and brine, is one of the most notable features in the geology of those substances; and seems to point to some unknown condition of the formation of the two first named."

(1) The finest yet primal oil globules, formed of bubbles of the ether, with the finest ramental angular particles of the earth's first salts, adjoined to them as by a marriage; the two being related as the soul and its body, or as the active center or internal of the sun, to its superinduced crustal body.

(2.) Angular particles, salts, acids and alkalies, with their concave sides, to act as conjunctives.

(3.) Water molecules, greater and less.

Where these are, with fostering heat from the natural sun, with inflowing determinants from the Sun of life, they may at once be framed into the palpitant jelly-like mass, that vesicular or foam-structure, the protoplasm which is the physiological basis of the embryonic life, vegetable or animal.

That this function, this power of the atmospheres, is an arcanum hitherto unknown; and that it is an essential of atmosphere,not only the spiritual atmosphere, but the natural,is noted in the Ath. Creed, n. 26; where the birth of insect forms, and the origin of the vegetative form is referred to the natural or terrestrial ether. To the ether as the vegetative soul, the Apocalypse Explained, n.1208, adds its testimonies. From it is the form of plants, and the building powers of coralline forms.

Even the inert substances adjoined, the earths, the salts, the waters, have the urgency toward their uses, springing from like affections and conjoining with the active forces, to bring forth the mutual offspring of use or concrete structural forms.²²¹ For the series of finiting, beginning in the Spiritual Sun, does not cease until in its last term, the quiescent matters of the terraqueous globe,²²² in which its efforts are all gathered up.²²³ Hence in the ultimates of active forces, or the ether, and of passive forces, or angular particles, the creative power of the Lord acts in fullness and strength.²²⁴ This is the first sphere of all, the sphere of these inert particles, given off by the salt of the sea and married with the ether in the production of the formative substances, or active seminal principles of vegetative life.

As for the third ether itself, the nuclear principle of its own bullae is a volume of the primal or celestial aura, which regards the Sun of Life alone. It is the celestial-natural degree of the Proceeding Divine, from which exists the conatus and actuality, in the forming force of vegetable life.

The type of reactive substances of materia arising from the coalescence of oils and "spirits" with water by means of the first salts, are noted as characteristic of the vegetable as well as of the animal kingdoms in E. A. K., part I. 75. The Corpuscular Philosophy notes that the whole vegetable kingdom is as it were formed of the little bullae of different kinds, or vesicles less and greater, determined by the enclosed ether, together with the surrounding salts. Revelation itself confirms this great testimony as to the conjunctive power of salt, which, it is stated in the Arcana Coelestia, n. 10300, "conjoins water and oil, which otherwise are not conjoined." In support of such a derivation of the basic bullular or foam-structure of the protoplasmic materia of forms capable of co-acting with life, that is, their derivation from oil, salt, and water, Butschli's famous work has come with triumphant emphasis. The first successful experiments, given in his work on Protoplasm and Microscopic Foams, were made from a bottle of olive oil that had long stood in the sun, and common salt finely ground, and water.²²⁸

For the wonderful work done with such foams, the interested reader is referred to the original volume. Here the quotation is adduced as a modern instance of what the Writings say as to the powers of salts to act as a conjunctive between water and oil; and an experimental confirmation of Swedenborg's statement that the structural result of such conjunctive action is the production of vesicles, bullae, or alveoli; which foam-type is given as characteristic of the structure of the minutest plastic particles, vegetative or otherwise, in which the life-formative immediately clothes itself about, and acts. To the confirmation of this, Andrews' study on the Living Substance gives emphatic testimony, as follows, "The structure of protoplasm, throughout the substance of all living organisms examined, except when secondarily altered, was found to be, as maintained by Butschli, that of a visco-fluid foam."

For the origin of living functionating units or forms, giving out characteristic spheres,that is, for the bringing into existence of the reacting foam-structure, jelly-like, plastic, namely, the protoplasm of the simplest outermost forms of vegetative life, and of the animal life which is confined to the vegetative or third ether plane,nothing is needed but the presence of water and salt particles, and the primitive ethereal oils, moving under the determination of the celestial sphere in the ether itself, with its first produced vesicles brooded and warmed by long sunshine, in a moist pressing atmosphere.

Later, the larger creatures, the scarcely living corals, set their tiny rock-bound bodies as steps for successive generations to climb by, to upper levels of island ring and reef. But over all the smooth wonder of the crustal covering of the sea, the living foam, the outputs of the seeking root, and the tinging leaf, began to be. Thus the first vegetative protoplasm took its rise in and from the purely jelly-like crustings of the primal sea, where the globules of ether-oil, the salts, the tangled mass of finites, the water particles, all, as they outwardly were warmed softly by the sun shining through the mists, were inwardly touched to living action by the celestial aura, imminent in every particle of ether-foam. And to this first source and conditionment of the spontaneous generation of primal forms of vegetative and animalculate life, the conditions under which the hell-broods of evil insect forms and evil animalculae came first and do still come to spontaneous generation, give the testimony of their mimicry. For they originated in "stagnant lakes, marshes, rank and fetid bodies."²³² And the plastic force of nature flowing into the ethers, acts to originate forms, everywhere and anywhere, "whenever homogenous exhalations are present in nature."³

Chapter VI. The First Vegetative Formation, and Its Living Service In Preparing An Atmosphere For Breathing Creatures.

Moreover, this first ultimate and ground, spread evenly upon the surface of the sea, was an especial ground, as it were all seed. For according to Swedenborg's laws of forms and their powers, the constitution of oils and formative fluids, the very floating crust of hydro-carbons collecting over the primal sea, presents the first actual union between the volumes of the ether and the finest particles broken from the compressed angular forms of the terraqueous salts. Thus this primal ground was itself everywhere, in its degree, apt for the reception of life and beginning of motion; and under the touch of the Divine hand, delicately touching within, and the warm sun conspiring without, its fine globules were everywhere able to act the part of a formative substance and very seed of vegetative forms, in their place and degree reactive to life.

Thus of these primeval ethereal oils and water, with the salts of the sea to serve as conjunctives, the Lord Himself acting through the medium of the ether existent in each oil bubble, framed the first coarser basic corporeal foams; throbbing, moving; obeying life; in which all the typical forms of the creative series, passive as well as active, were simultaneously existent.

In this manner on the warm sea were brought into existence the first forms of the protoplasmic foams: vegetative, simple, full of potencies. The ether within acted as a soul., a father, and stamped its own foam likeness, and its own recipience and obedience to the Divine influx, upon the forms thus builded. The salts of the earth, its basic angular forms, lent mother body and form; and as passives, bounded active forms, gave them terminus, corporated their determinations and excited their activities in determinate and rhythmic motions.* In each such least pin-point form, composed of such subtle basic protoplastic foams, the gracious moulding ether gathered up a million particles of earth, ramental particles and salts and molecules of water a million millions; and all those millions of particles, in themselves all scattered, sundered, self-helpless for all their evolving conatus within them, the ether swung and arranged into one vegetative form, concrete, integral, after its kind receptive of and coactive with the Infinite Esse. Moreover having builded those scattered particles into such a form, the same flowing ether, which had been the formative substance, still held them together, through all their little day of use. For to create is not only to form, but to hold together afterward as well.

Few and simple were the primitives of inert partides the primal sea could give for the first organic building; comparatively simple and undifferentiated the vegetative forms possible to be framed from them. But once let these simple vegetative bodies or forms begin to coact to life, and each one becomes as a new world, the matrix and creatrix of new forms; a new world of working use, to prepare from the old material new and varied store. Each least vegetative form takes the old salts of the sea, and carves them into new and divided forms. The growths riot hither and thither, in the accidents of their existence. The bodies of vegetation grow firmer and firmer, and death comes to seal their basic use. "Chiefly by the aid of the vegetative kingdom," the Corpuscular Philosophy says, there are formed at last marvelous varieties of new fragments, inert, like some new species of angular particles, no two of the infinite number quite alike. Thus there is brought into existence, as it were, a new, a second, earth or soil, brought forth upon the primal earth and from it, by means of the vital energy and happy accidents of the individuals of the primal vegetative kingdom. This use of providing a store of finer and more varied shapes and powers of inert particles is so important to all formation, that, without it, there could never upon the earth be formed bodies of more differentiated and varied receptivity than those of the first foam-cells of the warm sea, nor could animal bodies, of higher differentiation and life than the amoebic, ever arise; nor men ever appear. For to the body of their formation is necessary not only the existence of the kingdoms proceeding; but the cumulative result in varied store of concrete angular particles and spheres of diverse substance and form collected during long generations of the life and death of those kingdoms; so great, so microcosmic a variety, of such ultimate form, is necessary to frame this cunning and universal organic form of the human creature. For the human form must be a microcosmic form, even in respect to those angular particles, if it is to image, coact with, and ultimately receive as an organic foothold the fulness of the outgoing creative and formative life of our Lord, so that it may be the living tabernacle, corporeal, quick, of the Divine Human. Uses, so high in life, so deep to religion, are involved in the ultimates of the earth and the sea.

Thus the dissolution of plants contributes to the mineral kingdom; all as it were goes to form a new, more plastic and varied mineral kingdom. For the third "form of use" stored in the treasure house of the mineral kingdom, (what we call inorganic chemistry), "arises from plants fallen to dust, and from the remains of animals, and the continual evaporations and exhalations of them which mix with earths and form the soil."²³⁵

Thus the life and death of the successive generations of the vegetative forms contribute to the possibility of an ascending evolution of successively more differentiated and complex forms upon the earth; and are absolutely necessary to the bringing into existence the forms of animal nature, with indefinitely great range of variety.²³⁶

But there is something more important still; two uses of the vegetative kingdom as yet not touched upon. Every unit of organic form, every individual,—beginning with every smallest simplest integral individual of the vegetative kingdom, although it be framed of billions of particles of basic salts, inert fragments and watery molecules,—yet is builded and held together by the ether, in an integrity emulous of the Unity of the Divine Esse. Hence it gets its emulous title of individual. While it remains integral or individual, as such it is given in itself an interior circulation, emulous of the reflexing circle in God Man. As such it is given emulous creative or protoplasmic powers, powers of forming a forthgoing volatile sphere or emanation "consubstantiate" with itself; objectized to itself; and always lending itself aptly to a recreation of such a spiritual form as that of which it was primarily part. This latter power is its passive analogue and potency complementary to the active power and endeavor of the primitives of the spiritual Sun, always to form man, because primarily consubstantiate with God Man, the sole Substance or Esse, and proceeding as an emanation or sphere from Him.

the vegetable body to arise to animate and more self-conscious form in its use and recipiency of life; and such is the story which the Writings tell of the origin of insect forms, in the intrinsic conatus of the very substance of the vegetable plane towards fuller, more distinct reception of the animations of life. For as there is a continual endeavor of the minerals of the earth towards vegetation, so everywhere there is an effort of the very substance of the vegetable growths toward vivification. In both cases this ascending use to higher degrees of form and life, these uses by which their very bodies prepare and contribute themselves to become integral part of a higher degree of organic recipiency of life, is by means of their spheres, their emanations.²³⁹

This is the sacred use of the flowers and fruits and the perfumes of the vegetable forms; their Sabbath day use to the animate kingdom. In this they give forth the sphere of their purifications and their fructifications to the ether around; and of that sphere the living Lord, acting in that ether, moulds the bodies of the insect world, loving the flowers as their honey-nursing mothers still.

But there is an every day use performed through the common green leaves of plants, in which the whole of vegetation daily prepares and provides for the great kingdom of the larger lung-breathing animals,—a use so important that when we know it we understand why the vegetable kingdom had to exist before the world was ready for the animal kingdom of creatures with red blood and opened imperative lung-life. For the same kingdom, which, Swedenborg says, breathes forth daily into the atmospheres that aerial salt, that atmospheric salt which in the lungs changes the venous blood to arterial, must be that kingdom which first provides the store thereof, in preparation for the advent of the lung-breathing, red-blood forms of life.

This volatile aerial salt is exhaled by the vegetable kingdom from the grosser salts and compounds upon which the roots feed. The salts or mother stuff with which the current of the sap is impregnated, (that sap or vegetative blood in which the formative fluid of vegetation is present), takes what it wants of those compounds, sundering and recombining; while the watery vegetative blood climbs the woody fibre to the cells of the leaves; in these cells, as with the serum of the blood in the lungs, it exhales a dewy breath, carrying with it all the inert particles of the original compound salts which are superfluous to its needs; the sap current then returns by other fibrous ways to its ultimate cellular buildings.

These superfluous salts thus sublimated from the basic compounds of the plant food in the current of the vegetative blood, and exhaled along with watery vapor from the surface of the leaves, are said to be the very volatile aerial salts with which all the lower atmosphere or aura of the earths is impregnated; the same salt which in the lungs changes the venous blood into arterial.

To sum up: this "salt,"—volatile, atmospheric, dissolved in impalpable space, as sea salt in solution is dissolved in water: this salt-acid of the sulphur family: this salt which is drawn into the lungs at every inspiration and to which is due the change of venous blood into arterial during its passage through the lungs: this "salt" sublimed from its food stuffs by every vegetative growth and continually exhaled from every leaf into the surrounding space, along with the transpiring current of water which breaths forth from the leafy lung, when the sunlight opens its exspiratory pores;—this salt, by all its bond and chain of uses, is the atmospheric gas which we call oxygen.

In this derivation of the gas oxygen, (Swedenborg's volatile aerial salt), by sublimation from the salts of the earth and water, through the instrumentality of the vegetable kingdom, the volatile aereal salt being formed by the divided salts in the plant food, superfluous to its uses, there are three essential things new to our knowledge. First, the uses it subserves to the blood of a higher kingdom while composing itself into an entity or blood of a more ultimate degree. This use is new, indeed, to our knowledge. For it is Swedenborg alone who is able to tell us how a lower degree of substance can be compounded out of a higher; just what factors are needed; and where they come from. Something of the great doctrine of intermediates is involved here, and the Benjamin laws of composition. But of such things experimental science cannot teach us; only the laws of forms, and the constitution of degrees can teach us. Second, The derivation of this superfluous volatile salt thus exhaled, chiefly from the grosser noncompounded food-salts imbided by the roots, by a process of division and sublimation. Third, The surety under the law that the series of existence and continuance is always the same as that of formation and beginning, that if the activity of the vegetable kingdom perpetually performs this use to the atmosphere, it performed it in the first place. And therefore that all our stock of atmospheric oxygen, without which red-blooded breathing creatures cannot exist, was first prepared for the world by the activity of that same kingdom. This is the great common service or use performed by the vegetable kingdom to creation, preparatory for the existence of breathing creatures.

An interior view of the first point is given by Swedenborg only. But to the second and third points of this new knowledge, experimental data have, within a lifetime, afforded happiest illustrations. Phipson's series of experiments with growing plants are decisive upon the subject. According to the result of those experiments, when plants are grown under a bell glass in an atmosphere of pure nitrogen, (or pure hydrogen), the root being supplied with earth, carbonic acid, and water, the plants thrive; they absorb water and carbon compounds from the roots, and secrete oxygen from the leaves, until the atmosphere under the bell glass is rendered by this means alone richer in oxygen than the surrounding outside air. The carbonic acid (CO₂) is not directly decomposed into carbon and oxygen. From the CO₂ plus water (H₂O) are formed various sugars, starches, cellulose, fatty acids, and the like; and the superfluous oxygen thus liberated is exhaled through the leaves into the air.

Moreover, from conclusions reached on the basis of experiments with microscopic plants abounding in rain water and other water exposed to the action of sunlight, it would seem that plants of the simplest order evolve oxygen more copiously, weight for weight, than plants of the higher orders; and the deduction is made from these experiments that the primitive atmosphere of the earth did not contain oxygen gas, and that the vegetable kingdom was certainly the means, and the sufficient means, whereby oxygen gas was placed in the atmospheric volume; with the manifest further conclusion that therefore vegetable life must have preceded animal life upon the earth; and that a main office of the growing plants of that primal vegetable kingdom was this gradual excretion of oxygen gas (the volatile aerial salt of Swedenborg's), into the atmospheric volume, preparatory for the advent of breathing animal life.

Chapter VII. A Chapter in Geology

The simple nitrogen compounds thus arising would furnish the supply of nitrogen necessary as the mother stuff, to compound the flesh and substance of forms of animate life all through the sea; and the ascending current would, together with the carbons, year after year, continue to supply streams of fresh nutriment, like streams of new blood, to the roots of the floating vegetative world above it. All such particles not actually detained and used by the growing vegetation, would finally arise higher, into the elementary realm above the vegetative crust, and by the breaking of the carrier bubbles, vapor like, be dispersed into the interstices of the bullae of the surrounding ether volume, there to add their quota to the collecting store of the atmospheric nitrogen, slowly accumulating through the ages from sundry sources. For the sources of origin of nitrogen are more than one, the two chief sources being, first, the stores of the primal sea, and second, the play of lightning, tearing the ether bullae with its darts, and casting down the disrupted envelopes, as a loose contexture of fourth finites.²⁴⁹

Thus not only was the primal ocean a great cosmic source of nitrogen; but each flash of lightning in the sky actually begets a new volume of it into the air. Indeed the soil itself is now nourished by such new heaven-born particles caught on vapor bullae and descending to the earth in showers,²⁵⁰ as, primally, at the epoch of greatest vegetative growth, it was nourished from the depths of the ocean, upon the bosom of which it was afloat.

Silicon is one of the most abundant chemical elements in the earth's crust, being largely constitutive of all rocks produced by aqueo-thermal metamorphosis of the silicious oozes and sediments originally posited on the deep sea bottom, such as our granites and flints. Silicon is, indeed, a characteristic constituent both of the greater portion of the minerals of sea origin, and of all the vegetative forms which live and grow in the sea, from least to greatest. The glass sponges are a lovely instance of the latter, common to all our museums. In itself, as a chemical substance, silicon has been found to stand in the nearest possible relation to carbon in the periodic system; carbon and silicon being the first two members of the fourth periodic family, silicon carrying the greater atomic weight. Their closeness of constitutive factor and pattern is marked not alone in likeness of chemical reactions and affinities apparent in laboratory experiment, but in obvious physical states and properties; and in a physiological interchangeability in sundry simple forms of vegetative use and life. Like carbon, silicon is easily capable of existing in a colloidal or vitreous state, gelatine like, plastic and mutable. The colloidal constitution is characteristic of all the plastic elements of organized bodies. Hydrate of silica, as the geysers bring it up from the depths of the earth, is first deposited as an oozy gelatinous substance, like a soft jelly-glass, hardening by time. Moreover mineral forms of silicic acid, such as flint, are known to have passed during the geologic ages of their existence from the vitreous or colloidal into the crystalline condition. In addition, carbon is directly replaceable by silicon in the case of certain fungi, which grow as well when nourished by fresh colloidal silicon as by carbon. Moreover, spiral fibre masses, Sarcina-like bodies, and fungi, will develop de novo in colloidal silica, prepared under conditions which preclude the existence or the entrance of particles of living matter—"germs"—to initiate their growth.²⁵⁴ Such a thing implies that the very type of molecular aggregation marking the vitreous or colloidal state, such as characterizes both hydrate of silicon and the carbo-hydrates, must itself per se be physically an aggregation of least "matrices," or a mass of molecular bullae, or bubble cells. The envelopes of such bubble-cells like most impalpable shells close around and include small volumes of the ever present active ether, so as to form flexible closed bubbles, capable of reacting plastically and serviceably to the motions and impulsions of the life communicating ever ordinal ing ether which presents the Divine in Use or Operation. That all substances in the colloidal or vitreous state do actually possess such an interior molecular arrangement and massing into grosser, bullular forms, corresponding to those of the fine bullular ether, (which ether, indeed, probably forms the whole nuclear center of the grosser bullae). can be directly affirmed. We deduce this from Swedenborg's statement that the state of vitrification itrelf consists in a transposition of the particles of the substance into bullae or bubbles, and the conjunction of the same.

Such a bullular or foam-like and plastic interior constitution is characteristic of the oils, both of the mineral oils and the organic oils, the animal spirits and spirituous fluids, (the life-formative fluids) which are as higher oils. Its general type is illustrated in chapter XIV of the Chemistry, and further defined in E. A. K. part I. no. 75, and it is characteristic of all protoplasms.

In the Chemistry, as we have noted, this form is given as first originating in the deep sea, and produced by means of the ramental or wing-like fragments broken from the edges of the fresh dissolving salt. The form of these ramental fragments is slightly curving, a sickle-shaped particle: the concave edge being thin and keen, and the convex edge being markedly thicker. Swedenborg notes that the original ramental fragments have lines of easy fracture; and that by concussion of friction the thinner, lighter portion of the ramental scales is readily separable from the heavier; and that thus arise stores of ramental fragments of differing size and weight.

Now on comparing carbon with silicon as to properties, uses, and localities of most abundant store, the indications would seem to be that the ramental fragments of lighter weight, enveloping about the volumes of displaced ether, or of water vapor, constituted the lighter bullular foams composing the mineral hydro-carbons and carbonic acid, the bubbles of which, being light, ascended easily from the profound depths of the sea to its very surface, along with the ammonia compounds, there to lend their foam mass, palpitant in the warm sun's heat to form the body of the endlessly springing vegetable forms, the vast preserved store of which constitutes the carboniferous strata, the store houses of the primal superabundance of carbon for use of future ages. The heavier ramental fragments derived from the same original ramenta, but by reason of weight not so apt to rise lightly to the surface of the sea, formed with displaced ether bubbles bullae of like type as the hydro-carbons. All such bullae, loaded with weightier ramental fragments, probably never were able to rise far out of the zone of their original creation, but there in those sea depths came to analogous uses as the colloidal carbons. For what we term silicon, as has been said, stands in the nearest relation to carbon of any known substance. Its chemical affinities, relations, values, parallel those of carbon, only it is of greater atomic weight. Like carbon it is distinguished in its aptitude, its tendency, to form colloidal or jelly-like solutions and combinations. It is interchangeable with carbon in the growth of certain fungi, and sub-vital organized growths spring de novo in its fresh solutions. Moreover, it is present almost as universally and characteristically in submarine vegetation and microscopic and low forms of life as carbon alone is with relation to sub-aerial vegetation. It is indeed so abundant in many rock strata, known to have been primarily posited as sediments on the deep ocean bed, that Le Conte speaks of whole vast classes of minerals as for the most part existing in a sort of magma of the simple fused alkaline silicates. This would be what would naturally follow if the original ramental fragments abundant in the primal sea were rebroken into a lighter and heavier portion, and the lighter fragments formed bullae able easily to rise to the surface and found stored for the most part in the carbonaceous remains of vegetative life known to be of sub-aerial growth. But the bullae formed from the heavier ramental particles remained beneath the surface of the water, and are found stored in the vegetative and other forms of sub-aqueous life. Moreover, silica would be almost invariably characteristic of strata known to have been originally posited in the bed of the sea.

Now we know from Swedenborg that the first evolution of carbon on the earth must have been in the compound form of the mineral hydro-carbons, and perhaps carbonic acid also—arising from the salt beds in the deeps of the primeval sea. There certainly seems presumptive evidence also, from a connection of Swedenborg's principles with the various facts cited relative to silicon, to conclude that the known evolution of carbon gives us a clue also to the evolution of silicon, its nearest chemical relative. Silicon would seem, therefore, to have been first evolved on earth in its hydrate compound, in the depths of the sea, at the same time that primal carbon compounds were in formation. The heavier edges of the ramental fragments broken from the primal salts bear the same relation in their constitution to the primal silicon compounds, that the lighter ramental fragments do in the constitution of the allied carbon compounds; and the place of their greatest abundance and use is, naturally, in the water near the place of their origination, as befitted their heavy inaptitude to rise; while the lighter weighted carbon-compound rose to a place of uses where sea and air joined.

So far as the history has gone, we have followed the making of the primal unsalted sea, and the sequent evolution of the halogens and the alkaline metals, in the form of their compounds or salts, framed in the depths of the sea from the spherical water particles. In this formation the metallic hydrogen of the water particle was compressed and cast from the spherical into the cubic form, characterizing the alkaline metals, as sodium, potassium, etc., and the spherical oxygen crust of the water particles was pressed and cast into the mould of the triangular particles of the acid halogens; and both, (by aid of the uncrushed particles of the water of crystallization present), were fitted together on the crystalline model. Of such units the great crystalline layer of rock salt was framed as the floor of the sea.

The second epoch, according to Swedenborg's system of substance and world making, was ushered in with the beginning of the solution of the rock salt layer in the sea. In the process of this solution, the units of the alkaline metals and of the halogens which compounded the salt, were dissociated and set free for new combinations and services. The fresh ramental fragments,—thin winglike, curving scales—were broken from the edges of the angular forms built into the crystalline salt, and, later, were themselves broken. The third ether, displaced from the interstices of the round water particles by the particles of the dissolving salt, ascended through the sea; and around it as it arose, the ramental particles were attracted, gathered and grouped. The lighter ramental particles were lightly borne by the streams of ascending ether to the upper air, together with the lighter triangular fragments broken off; and through all this age we may imagine that the sea bubbled from its very depths with the rising bullae of the mineral hydro-carbons and carbonic acid intermingled with the simplest ammonical compounds. On the warm surface of the sea this rising material served life as a mother or matrix stuff; and of this first union of the ether and the inert particles shaped in the sea, the first vegetative protoplasms took form as the beginnings of a floating land, and stores of carbon. The heavier ramental particles left behind, clinging to and gathering around the like ether bubbles, weighted and detained them in the volume of the sea; and there they also came to their use, as coadjutors of the carbons, in serving the Infinite Life for a mother matrix and body of simple forms of vegetative and obscure life; and there in the sea depths the remains of such life were chiefly stored, to frame the strata of our rock-bound coasts.

This epoch was long. Its accumulations were on an immense scale. Swedenborg says the floating continents framed of pure vegetation, formed on the surface of the primal sea, attained to the thickness of a mile and formed an immense crust of vegetation and the debris of vegetative growth almost compassing the circuit of the world-enveloping sea. The marine vegetation below the floating crust, and the deposits of silicious and calcareous ooze accumulating from the remains of the minutest vegetative and animate creatures toward the bottom of the sea, must have been of commensurate thickness; to say nothing of the sediment silting down from the upper floating lands.

One thing in Swedenborg's system of chemical and geological evolution is of especial note just here. He reads the succession of early geological strata not as implying successive ages of formation, but as implying layers of coincident formation or preparation, at different depths in the ocean; that is, he reads the geological record in leaves, from the bottom of the ocean up. Thus according to his theory, the growth of the great floating islands of vegetation of the carboniferous age, would be going on at the top of the sea, coincidently with the formation of the submarine vegetation lower down and the deposition of the strata of sediment and the calcareous and silicious oozes in the depths of the sea. Thus, according to him, one and the same age would cover the formation and simultaneous existence of all these layers. And the vegetative crust over the sea, the submarine vegetative world, the lower zones of the deep sediments and calcareous oozes, collecting just above the basic dissolving thinning sheet of rock salt, flooring the sea, would, all, be the offspring of one epoch.

But there is one stratum, one layer, which we have not yet mentioned, although it is of the greatest importance. It figures as one of the two agencies which combine in the upheaval of mountain chains, in the elevation of lands and of islands. Its substance forms the core of mountain chains. It furnishes part of the inner baking heat which metamorphoses the plastic sediment of the ocean bed, when elevated into mountain cones,—into the stuff of our more refractory rocks. In it is the spring of all volcanic rise and overflow; and among conditions existent in it alone, the magnetic ores take their original shaping.

All these several and great uses it enters into, and is an indispensable part and party to. Yet it constitutes probably a layer of no great thickness relatively to the deep rock salt stratum as originally formed above it. It is the sub-saline layer, lying as an intermediate layer in unstable equilibrium, semi-liquid, held between the firm crystalline strata which are vaulting above it on the one hand, and on the other the inner rigid, round core of the globe itself which is the most dense solid substance created, wound of ordered lines of fourth finites: cold and dark and firm forever.

The formation of this sub-saline layer was coeval with the formation of the rock salt layer itself. In fact, the lowermost portions of the rock salt stratum pass into it by imperceptible graduations; as the pressure becomes so great the delicate crystalline units themselves are disintegrated or imperfectly formed. But although it was brought into existence so early in the series of world evolution, the potencies of this intermediate stratum waited to come to their realization and unlocking in use, until that far later world-time arrived when the enormous islands of floating vegetation had become from the accumulation of ages so dense that their mile deep crust was grown too thick and heavy to sustain itself longer afloat upon the surface of the sea: and vast areas of that vegetative crust, continent wide, broke off here and there, and settled down; at first little by little and slowly, and then swiftly and with heavy vacuum rush, to the floor of the sea. Then the immense body of ocean water displaced, swirled upward, in vast wave, and poured itself in powerful cataract current over the submerging land, till equilibrium was restored and a peaceful sea. And the old story began again, until some new collapse and catastrophe occurred unlocking mighty agencies.

The grounds of our certainty as to the existence of a sub-saline stratum, pasty and unstable, lying between the crystalline floor of the sea and the central rigid ball of the globe, are very simple. The condition of the formation of crystalline or rock salt is, that not all the water particles shall be crushed into the new angular forms, but only a certain proportion of them. The uninjured water molecules of a certain amount of water of crystallization are necessary for crystalline formation. In fact, they were necessary for the shaping of the very angular particles of the salt, since those angular particles were moulded to the interstices of the water particles.

Now this implies a nice adjustment of the pressure to the work to be done. With ,too little pressure, salt would not be produced at all. With too much pressure its delicate crystalline shapes would equally fail to be produced. In the latter case there would ensue not the new form of delicate angular masses, finer than any microscope can hope to see, beautiful and without break or crushing, modelled into the interstices of the uninjured round molecules of the water of crystalization, by which everywhere they were at once moulded into and sustained in their new shape,—but there would ensue a crushing disintegration of all the water particles, and by consequence the angular forms of the salts would fail to be formed; and the result would be only a pasty, more or less inchoate mass of the various grades of simple component finites. Thus the rock-salt layer with its perfect crystallization could come to birth only in that particular lower zone of the ocean depths where there existed an "equilibrium between the pressures and the conservation of the percentage of intermingled water molecules necessary as moulds for the new and angular forms. Now, in the lowermost ocean deeps, when the universal sea rested immediately upon the rigid planetary core of the grosser metallic finites, at a depth so great that the bullae of the interfluent third ether were no longer present, but the second or magnetic aura, and the primal aura, alone could be present and ordinative, then, Swedenborg says, the very water particles and the forms as yet created were crushed down and disintegrated even to the point of a disintegration of the larger component finites or corpuscles into their own finer constituents; from which would result a layer presenting a sort of pasty mass of intermingled finites, crushed from the materia of the superincumbent sea, just around the original rigid, resistant core of the planet.

Such a result evidently is consequent on a degree of pressure greater than that which gives rise to the crystalline layer of salt formed at the bottom of the primal shoreless sea, the solution of which in the water above, gives rise to the ascending bubbles of displaced ether as described. Its site is therefore lower or nearer to the earth's center than the layer of rock salt. Indeed the crystalline layer of the original salt bed, flooring the sea, where it abuts on the rigid earth core, may be assumed to lose its perfect firm crystalline type and gradually merge into the postulated inchoate semifluent mass of pure finites; and is only kept from passing out of its pasty relatively cold state, and fusing and flowing and running into the fiery incandescent state, by reason of the strict limits into which it is coerced by the pressure above it, and the resistance below.

Thus under the solid floor of the primal ocean with its great rock salt layer, and its weight of heaping sediments and swarming life between that solid floor and the rigid metallic core of the globe, itself compressed from the homogeneous planetary mass into a solidly wound ball of threads of fourth finites alone, we may assume an intermediate pasty or semifluid layer consisting of heterogeneous finites of various degrees, originally compressed from the lowermost layers of the water of the sea and from the salt itself. Between the core of the earth, which is a rigid solid globe, and the floor of the ocean with its strata of crystalline salt and the sedimentary strata of the ages, there existed from the first and exists now, a fluent or semifluent inchoate layer of great instability, held down and together by the pressures and the resistances on either side: but on the least relief of pressure liable to instant fusion, and the rise of temperature to incandescence.

This layer is the source of the energy of seismic disturbance; it is the spring of volcanic overflow; and its liability to fusion with rise of temperature on the least relief or variation of the coercing pressures was and is one of the two agencies concerned in all upheavals of land or ocean bottom, the elevation of mountain chains, and the sudden appearance, temporary or permanent, of islands in the sea.

The first mountain upheaval of all, the very first lift of the floor of the sea with all its strata upon it into great cone-like ridges, took place in swift sequence upon the subsidence of the first great area of the upper floating vegetative crust to the floor of the sea. Then the weight of that crust was localized upon the portion of sea floor upon which it rested; and coincidently the water mass it displaced seeking place and sucked upward by the vacuum the falling mass created, flowed in great upward currents, rising all about the edges of the fallen continent, relatively lessening the pressure there while the weight of the subsided mass increased the pressure on the sea floor over the area upon which it rested. The sea floor yielded and bent down under the weight of the broad stratum of the fallen upper crust, and at the same moment all around the borders of the depressed area, it lifted and waved upward. To this relative fluctuation of pressure above it, the potencies of the semifluent layer lying between the salt bed and the rigid core of the globe instantly responded, and where the pressure was momentarily lessened, there it fused, flowed, glowed, and upheaved the ocean bed with all its strata on it, into a vast rim bordering the submerged area, and rising higher and higher until a new equilibrium of pressure was reached. This was the formation of the first mountain chain, and this is why mountain ranges border continents, for continents generally consist of interior basins with coast chain rims.

After a new equilibrium of pressure and forces had ceased, the fused mass of the pasty subsaline layer, although it had no more spring and freedom to rise higher, was able to hold its first rise, and cooled, solidified, crystallized as it stood, the original mass being partly sublimed, partly fused, in its upheaval, as the gaseous and glassy inclusions show.

This cooled mass is the igneous granite of which the cores of all mountain ranges consist.

The fiery heat of that great release and fusion acted upon the partially plastic strata of the ocean bed upheaved with the rise of the subsaline layer and lying around and about it, as the heat of the brick kiln acts on the vault of piled brick within which it glows. The nearest layers are fused; all according to their relative distance, are hardened, altered, baked. Thus also the sedimentary strata nearest the igneous rock were literally fused, the silicious into the metamorphic granite, with their evidence of sedimentary origin and crystallization from an aqueous-thermal state, as their liquid inclusions of carbonic acid testify,²⁶² while the chalks changed into marble. Moreover, all through the metamorphic strata, carboniferous remains and the mineral oils detained still in the deep sea sediment, tended, as the mass reached fusion heats, to be sublimated and precipitated, as veins of pure graphite, characteristic of such rock.

Again, the highly metamorphic rocks, and the igneous rock masses of the mountain cores, as welt as in a more marked degree the output of volcanoes, are characterized by the presence of the magnetic ores. For only under such conditions and in such localities as preclude the presence of the third or electric ether, while admitting the free entrance of the second or magnetic aura alone, can the magnetic ores or mineral be formed and brought into existence, as in the only matrix appropriate to the production of their peculiar molecular constitution. For the substance of all hard bodies is textured of little bodies,molecules or least units,—"diversely configurated, as also diversely perforated" with pores large or pores small according to the nature of the composition. Only such little bodies or forms are magnetic, as, however configurated, are furnished with pores or meatuses so subtle as to be permeable by the magnetic elementary or the second aura, but not by the ether, so that the second aura alone is able to pass through their little fixed pores and openings as blood through a vein. With that flow established, the fine tide of the second aura is able to return outside and perfect a true vortex. Such are the least forms of molecules of all magnetic minerals and of iron. Moreover, masses of such bodies as are magnetic are surrounded by a cloud or molecular sphere of free corpuscles of precisely the same nature, each one the center of a least magnetic vortex, the flow of which passes directly through the channels of its minute interior perforations; the latter were indeed formed and kept open by the flux and reflux of that same element, when its constitutive molecular system was laid for it in the deep womb of the earth.²⁸⁴ To these molecular vortices and their mutual colligation are due the lines of physical force existing around a magnet, and constituting its magnetic force.

Thus it is sufficiently obvious that the purely magnetic ores can originate, and have their distinctive molecular constitution formed only under circumstances and in a situation, where the presence of the third ether is precluded; and the delicate intramolecular system of pores characterizing the metal is originally ordinated in the presence and under the action alone of the immensely more fine and high magnetic or second aura.

Another thing is of interest here. The original cone-like upheavals of the ocean floor lose their pristine height; and that not necessarily by subsidence of their igneo-fluent core, nor by exterior erosive or disintegrative agencies, aqueous or sub-aerial, although the latter may add themselves, and, in time, finish up and perfect what the main agency does with comparative rapidity and at once. The sedimentary strata of the ocean floor at the time of their first upheaval, and especially in the primal period of the first upheavals that ever occur, although compacted, are themselves plastic to a very considerable extent. They cannot be otherwise. Such strata if thrust up from below into a great peak-like cone by an agent extraneous to themselves, will begin, as it were, to slowly slide down hill, and subside and settle down on themselves; each stratum thus widening and spreading out, at the expense of the height of the cone. This process will continue, until arrested by the hardening and metamorphic alteration of substance produced by hill, and subside and settle down on themselves; by this lateral slip, combined with the heat conveyed into them from the igneous core. This at once accounts for the fact that strata composing mountains are always thicker than the same strata as they lie out over the plain of the general continent, and obviates any necessity of presuming the endless geologic ages, necessary to account by known sub-aerial agencies for the present denudation or wearing of peaks, as high as strata of such original thickness would imply. It also accounts for the fact that the younger or later mountains are the higher and still rising; while earlier mountains as representing upheavals of the original more plastic bed of the sea, are the lower and apparently the most lowered and denuded; since the more plastic the state of the ocean floor at its uplifting, the greater and the faster would be its native slip and subsidence; thus the greater the spreading out and thickening of strata thus produced at the expense of their first height, the greater the crumbling of the strata, and the greater the heat evolved by the sideways slip and sideways crushing of the mass, with consequent metamorphic result. All these points characterize the strata of the so-called Archaean Era.

In the first place, the waves of gravity initiated at any fluctuant drop and lift of the ocean floor, are great enough to drag bottom even in deep sea, and travel with a known velocity of from 370 to 450 miles per hour. That waves of such type would occur, with every such incident in cosmic history, is apparent. There is also to be reckoned the enormous speeding swirl of the ocean currents, swinging in over the swiftly submerging lands. And with both agencies we can figure on the law that the weight of the fragments a current can carry varies as the sixth power of the velocity.

Thus we can estimate the enormous waves and currents of the sea, set up at every greater subsidence of portions of the floating upper crust; their violence, their power to tear off even mountains and slide them along over the passing bed of their irresistible flow, boring and graving the strata beneath in correspondent channels and flutings as if they carried graving tools; while lesser rocks, borne from their far native place, as sediments and finest pebbles are borne by quieter, slower streams, were posited in heaps and drifts, along their flow. The piles of such remains of successive diluvial disturbances, appear as the scattered rock drift of our lands to-day.

In addition to the creation of the lighter alkaline metals in the salt of the sea, and the formation of the heavier magnetic metals, chiefly in and around mountains where the third ether is barred out and the igneous and metamorphic traits are most marked, there occurred a later, very widespread infiltration and interpenetration of free metallic particles or primitives into the very corpuscles of forms already created. Thus three geometrical types of forms (rendered as it were metallized, more inert, and heavier), resulted from this action in the course of time.

If by an accession of free third finites, the fifth finites composing the envelope of the water particle were entered., and as it were infilled and fixed, then would result a globular metallic form, called the mercurial globule, and also the metallic oil globule.

A comparison with Principia, part III. chap. VIII, (where it is noted that the third finites, free and active, cannot be in the same space as fifth finites, without disturbing their motion and so interpenetrating them as to cause them to become non-active; nor the second finite, free and active, with the fourth), suggests the condition of the fifth finites composing the envelope of the water particles, when interpenetrated and infilled by an accession of third Unites free and active. In such an impregnation and infilling of the fifth finites as produces the round metallic particle called the mercurial globule, it is evident that the water particle becomes transformed, and the fifth finites heavier and more inert. A like infiltration or impregnation of the angular salt particles takes place, fifth finites of salt particle being infilled by free third finites, and the fourth finites being infilled by second finites. In the case of the cubic particle, the alkaline metal, of the salt, this apparently produces the heavier members of the alkaline and earthy metal family; all more inert, of greater atomic weight, and of physical characteristics more obviously those we associate with the term metal.

In the case of the triangular or acid particles of the salt, this metallic impregnation of the original form seems to result in the constitution of the heavier, more inert later members of the various periodic families concerned, and probably accounts for the fact that even those periodic families which in their first most active and lightest members show no slightest trace of metallic characteristic, do show such characteristics markedly in their later members all of which possess also greater chemical inertia and greater atomic weight.

The constitution of lead, Swedenborg says, is framed both of such metallic round particles or globules, and of the infilled metallic cubes. That being so, the presumption would be that comparatively quiet and undisturbed sedimentary strata would be most likely to afford the necessary matrix of perfect cubes, and perfect round water particles, in the orderly juxtaposition. This, perhaps, is the cause of the fact that while the ore deposits of other metals are formed chiefly in the vicinage of mountains characterized by metamorphic features, lead is an exception to the general rule, being associated largely with quiet sedimentary strata; its formation probably belonging to rather later eras.

Such, according to Swedenborg's system, is an outline of the cosmic causes and effects of the successive diluvial catastrophes; and such their gracious use in the Divine Providence "that all that was hidden in the bowels of the earth and all that the planet had gained by successive series of changes and multiplied events, in this manner should be made available to the use of mortals, which it seems could not have been the case had not the terraqueous globe been forced to submit to disruption, and to the oppression of the deluge. ... In this way matrices and ores were carried to the coldest regions of the earth; which results would probably have been impossible unless the planet had been violently treated in the way above described, and made patulous in various places, and so had received throughout its surface an insemination of fit materials."²⁷¹