6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



occasional interruptions in the production of electricity and in its pas- 

 sage into space. 



In ascribing to meteors an important part in the train of events 

 which these widely extended forces are capable of producing, it is not 

 necessary to adopt the extravagant estimates which were made of the 

 numbers of these vagrant bodies in order to support a recently exploded 

 theory in regard to the origin of celestial light. According to some 

 eminent scientists, the amount of meteoric matter which falls to the 

 sun's surface every year would increase his diameter annually about 

 two hundred and forty feet, and it would exceed the mass of Mars. But 

 from their occasional falls to the earth, and from other facts, it may be 

 safely concluded that the number of meteors which become tenants of 

 the solar dominions in the course of one or two millions of years, would 

 afford material enough to form a planet as large as the earth, even if 

 half their numbers could be made to unite into one bodv, instead of 

 being allowed to rove indiscriminately through the system and to fall 

 to the larger spheres. Now, the arrangement necessary for such a union 

 would arise in our supposed binary system from the movement of the 

 two suns in their magnetized condition around their common center of 

 gravity. The powerful display of electro-magnetism succeeding each 

 stage of dismemberment would gradually bring the majority of all the 

 wandering meteors into the same plane, and give them orbits of a larger 

 size and constantly approaching nearer to a circular form. Though 

 constantly declining, this force must, during many thousand centuries, 

 exert a predominant sway over meteors and comets, collecting them on 

 the verge of the binary system in such numbers and in such a regular 

 array that their aggregation into one body, though long deferred, would 

 be inevitable. A nucleus once formed would increase by appropriating 

 matter from the zone which it traversed, and, though at first much re- 

 tarded in its growth, it would after many thousand revolutions attain a 

 planetary size. Being largely composed of gaseous matter and there- 

 fore very sensitive to the resistance of a space-pervading medium, the 

 newly formed planet would contract its large orbit; and room would be 

 thus made for bringing into being another mundane structure when, 

 after the lapse of millions of centuries, another paroxysmal stage of 

 incorporation awakened electric energy and prepared the way for a new 

 coalition of the vagrant matter of the celestial regions. After number- 

 less ages the recurrence of the dismemberment would give existence to 

 another planetary orb, and increase the mass of the preexisting ones. 

 Accordingly, the verge of a solar system must be considered as the birth- 

 place of all its primary worlds. 



It is evidently in this external zone, where solar attraction is most 

 feeble, that we may hope to find the most favorable conditions for the 

 union of small into large masses. In the asteroidal region two spheres 

 of granite, having each a diameter of one hundred miles, could not con- 

 trol the velocity with which they would sweep by one another on meet- 



