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In order to change the conditions, it suffices to admit that the ethereal mass revolves in space around the sun with a velocity which is in each place that of the planets there; and this is very reasonable if, admitting the nebular hypothesis, we draw the deduction that the cause that has communicated the velocity to the successive rings has communicated it to the ethereal mass.
In saying this, we do not challenge the proof of the nebular theory itself. That theory may or may not be true. We are quite willing to suppose it true to grant that it has been scientifically established.
It is not so much that nebular theory which worries me, when I think about this subject, as a kind of bewilderment when I try to conceive of a consciousness filling all those frightful blanks of space they talk about. I sometimes doubt whether that young man worships anything but the stars. They tell me that many young students of science like him never see the inside of a church.
And, after all, is it quite so certain that a genetic relation may not underlie the classification of minerals? The inorganic world has not always been what we see it. It has certainly had its metamorphoses, and, very probably, a long "Entwickelungsgeschichte" out of a nebular blastema.
These will give to us tested and critical knowledge of the processes which go on around us, of the drift of the stars in the world-spaces, of the spiral movements of nebular matter, of the evolution of the elements, of the integration of organic forms, of the development of historic life.
But there is another sense in which the Dominion of Canada, or at least part of it, is perhaps the oldest country in the world. According to the Nebular Theory the whole of our planet was once a fiery molten mass gradually cooling and hardening itself into the globe we know.
The man who fancies that the nebular theory implies that the law of gravitation, or any other physical law, has of itself determined the course of cosmical evolution, so that there is no need for believing in the existence and operation of a divine mind, proves merely that he is not exempt from reasoning very illogically.
Though, doubtless, if the existence of nebulous matter now in course of concentration be disproved, one of the evidences of the Nebular Hypothesis is destroyed, yet the remaining evidences remain. It is a tenable position that though nebular condensation is now nowhere to be seen in progress, yet it was once going on universally.
Maunder conjectures all "white" nebulæ to be made up of sunlets in which the coronal element predominates, while chromospheric materials assert their presence in nebulæ of the "green" variety. Among the ascertained analogies between the stellar and nebular systems is that of variability of light. On October 11, 1852, Mr. Hind discovered a small nebula in Taurus.
The nebular hypothesis, Laplace's or Compte's theory of planets shelled off from the sun, spontaneous generation, some of these vagaries, we admit, are of much older date than the year 1800, the Macleay system, dogs playing dominoes, negroes born of white parents, materialism, phrenology, he adopts them all, and makes them play an important part in his own magnificent theory, to the exclusion, in a great degree, of the well-accredited facts and established doctrines of science.
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