5 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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of times those which have thus been recognized. In the former case 

 the capturing-places in the solar system are very limited in extent 

 compared with the dimensions of the system ; but in the latter case it 

 is the whole domain of the sun which we have to compare with that 

 mere thread of space traversed by our earth within the solar system. 



I might have arrived at the same result, however, in entirely differ- 

 ent ways a consideration which is at once the most marked charac- 

 teristic and the surest test of truth in a general theory of this sort. 



Suppose, for instance, I had begun with the discovery by Professor 

 Young that the sun has tremendous ejective might. I have shown, 

 from the circumstances attending the formation of the eruptive promi- 

 nences, that they do not indicate the ejection of glowing hydrogen and 

 helium, but of small masses of denser matter through those gases. (I 

 note, in passing, that Tacchini's observations during the last eclipse 

 have practically demonstrated the justice of this view.) I have further 

 proved that such masses of ejected matter have in some cases had 

 velocities exceeding the three hundred and eighty-two miles per sec- 

 ond which the sun can master, and therefore must have passed forever 

 away from him. From this demonstrated fact, as surely as from M. 

 Daubree's demonstrated facts about meteorites, we can work out the 

 whole theory of cometic and meteoric ejection. For our sun, being one 

 of the stars, we may infer that what he does each star also does. 

 Again, what he does now he must have done (perhaps once with even 

 greater energy) during all the millions of years that he has been a sun 

 and doing sun-work. So also must all the suns which people space, 

 during the past millions of years of their sun-work, have expelled 

 from time to time flights of small bodies (whose nature we have yet, 

 so far as this discussion of our theory is concerned, to determine). 

 We may conclude that from the total matter ejected at any outburst 

 many millions of small bodies would be formed as the originally va- 

 porous matter vomited forth condensed into the liquid form and then 

 into the solid perhaps quite close to the parent orb. But the total 

 mass ejected would bear to the ejecting body some such relation as 

 the total mass of the dust ejected at Krakatoa bore to the six hundred 

 millions of millions of millions of tons of the earth's mass ; a hundred 

 millions of years of such ejective work from an orb like our sun 

 might well be unable to eject a total mass from out of which such a 

 globe a3 even the least of the asteroids could be formed. Moreover, 

 what we have thus inferred about each sun during the whole of its 

 career up to the present time, we must infer also of each one of the 

 bodies attending on each of those suns, during the sun-like portion of 

 the career of each such attendant orb. 



Hence, taking an average meteor-flight to represent the number 

 of bodies at each ejection, ten effective ejections per annum for each 

 sun-like orb, an average of a million years only for the sun-like dura- 

 tion of each orb in space, a thousand millions of suns in our galaxy 



