20 Wilde, Origin of Covietary Bodies and Saturn's Rings, 



The resemblance of Saturn's rings to the Zodiacal 

 Light is briefly indicated by Kant in a short chapter of 

 his ' Theory of the Heavens,' in which he accounts for 

 its origin by assuming that the fire of the sun raises from 

 its surface vapours similar to those which formed Saturn's 

 ring, and by their motion around the sun formed an 

 .expanded plain in the plane of the sun's equator, or in the 

 figure of a convex lens. 



Modern investigators have since carefully observed 

 this singularly interesting object, and mostly agree that 

 it is a vast accretion of cometary and meteoric particles 

 from outer space and extending beyond the earth's orbit, 

 but none of them, so far as I know, has suggested the 

 interior of the sun as the place from which the Zodiacal 

 substance has been ejected. 



That cometary and meteoric matter may have contri- 

 buted to the volume of discrete bodies surrounding the 

 sun and extending to some distance within the orbit of 

 Mercury has some degree of probability in its favour, but 

 the extreme tenuity of the outermost parts of the Zodiacal 

 substance, together with its immense distance from the 

 central body, appears to me to be better accounted for on 

 the supposition of its consisting of the lighter elementary 

 substances in a state of extreme sub-division ejected 

 during solar eruptions, as in the instance of the ejection 

 of enormous masses of hydrogen observed by Young 

 which I have already adduced. 



CORRIGENDUM and ADDENDUM. 



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