The room vanished from her eyes.

Away, away, over lands and seas and space on the rushing desire flies the disprisoned mind! Upon a stratum, not of this world, stood the world-born shapes of the sons of Science, upon an embryo world, upon a crude, wan, attenuated mass of matter, one of the Nebulae, which the suns of the myriad systems throw off as they roll round the Creator's throne*, to become themselves new worlds of symmetry and glory,--planets and suns that forever and forever shall in their turn multiply their shining race, and be the fathers of suns and planets yet to come.
(*"Astronomy instructs us that, in the original condition of the solar system, the sun was the nucleus of a nebulosity or luminous mass which revolved on its axis, and extended far beyond the orbits of all the planets,--the planets as yet having no existence.

Its temperature gradually diminished, and, becoming contracted by cooling, the rotation increased in rapidity, and zones of nebulosity were successively thrown off, in consequence of the centrifugal force overpowering the central attraction.

The condensation of these separate masses constituted the planets and satellites.

But this view of the conversion of gaseous matter into planetary bodies is not limited to our own system; it extends to the formation of the innumerable suns and worlds which are distributed throughout the universe.
The sublime discoveries of modern astronomers have shown that every part of the realms of space abounds in large expansions of attenuated matter termed nebulae, which are irregularly reflective of light, of various figures, and in different states of condensation, from that of a diffused, luminous mass to suns and planets like our own."-- From Mantell's eloquent and delightful work, entitled "The Wonders of Geology," volume i.