PREFACE
Since I presented Worlds in the Making and Life of the Universe as Conceived by Man from Earliest Ages to the Present Time to the public—which received them with far greater interest and appreciation than I could foresee—I have had repeated occasions to treat new questions of a cosmological nature, questions largely arisen from new discoveries and observations within the scope of astronomy. Vast new vistas have been opened through the study of the relation of the stars to the “Milky Way” and through observations of our neighbour planets. The last mentioned give plain indications of the course of planetary evolution and thus enable us to surmise the changing fate and future position of the Earth. In an earlier German publication, Das Schicksal der Planeten (1911), I dealt with some of these problems. As, further, the evolution of the solar system from the Milky Way nebula, to which I have devoted several lectures at home and abroad, may be considered as the pre-history of the evolution of the planets, I have given this collection of cosmogenic articles the common title The Destinies of the Stars. I offer as introduction a lecture delivered before the Fourth International Philosophical Congress in Bologna, 1911, dealing with the “Origin of Star-Worship.”
Hoping that this little book will, to a considerable extent, fill the gaps in my previous works, I present these treatises in remodelled form.
Svante Arrhenius.
Stockholm,
November, 1915.