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Slowly setting around common centres, however, in anticipation of Sir Isaac Newton's gravitative theories, the fluid haze gradually collected into suns and stars, whose light and heat is presumably due to the clashing together of their component atoms as they fall perpetually towards the central mass.
When by some disturbance, as possibly by the passage of a great meteoric body of a considerable gravitative power, this ring was broken in two, the particles composing it on either side would, because of their mutual attraction, tend to draw away from the breach, widening that gap until the matter of the broken ring was aggregated into a sphere of the star dust or vapour.
If there were a discoverable center of predominant gravitative power, to which the motions of all the stars could be referred, those motions would appear less mysterious, and we should then be able to conclude that the universe was, as a whole, a prototype of the subsidiary systems of which it is composed.
The arch to such a bridge would have to abut, according to Professor Tyndall, on a vital foundation at one end, and spring from undifferentiated sky-mist at the other. The bridge will never be built. Life Its True Genesis. The profound Newton did not attempt to show what the gravitative force of the universe was.
The paragraph which then follows runs thus: "But what," it may be asked, "will become of this gaseous nucleus when exposed to the enormous gravitative pressure of a shell some thousands of miles thick? How can aeriform matter withstand such a pressure?" Very readily.
Possibly both methods have been in operation, a portion of the constituents of the former atmosphere and oceans having entered into chemical combinations in the lunar crust, and the remainder having vanished in consequence of the lack of sufficient gravitative force to retain them. But why, it may be asked, should it be assumed that the moon ever had things which it does not now possess?
The great lesson we learn by this extreme contrast of conditions supplied to us by nature, as if to enable us to solve some of her problems, is, the overwhelming importance, first, of a dense and well-compacted surface, due to water-action and strong gravitative force; secondly, of a more or less general coat of vegetation; and, thirdly, of a dense vapour-laden atmosphere.
They may, in a word, be due to volcanic explosions occurring on this and other celestial spheres. The question suggested above as to the possibility of volcanic ejections throwing matter from the earth beyond the control of its gravitative energy is one of great scientific interest.
The little drops of water which gather round dust motes, falling but slowly toward the earth, are free to obey the attractions which they exercise upon each other impulses which are partly gravitative and partly electrical.
And he even denies to them the poor right to originate or in any way modify their own plasma. He says: "They are no more the producers of vital phenomena, than the shells scattered in orderly line along the sea-beach are the instruments by which the gravitative force of the moon acts upon the ocean. Like these, the cells mark only where the vital tides have been, and how they have acted."
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