PROCEEDINGS OF THE POLYTECHNIC ASSOCIATION. G13 



Cosmogony. 



Dr. Vaiuler Weyde gave, by request, his views on Cosmogonj^ 

 and said : 



The h3'pothesis of La Phice and Kant is, by the modern dis- 

 coveries of the conservation of forces, elevated into a theory ; it 

 is this : In the beginning, all atoms were diffused in the intiuite 

 space ; by contraction they have collected in different centres, 

 which now constitute the millions of suns and planetary systems. 

 When we compare the mass of our planetary system with the 

 space it occupies in the universe between the lixed stars, and 

 imagine that its atoms were again diffused as a nebula, a simple 

 calculation shows us that every single pound of matter would 

 have forty millions of cubic miles to expand in, thus constituting 

 a nebular substance l^y comparison of which our hydrogeji is very 

 coarse and heavy, as a pound of pure hydrogen only occupies IGO 

 cubic feet; common, impure hydrogen is much heavier. This 

 exemplilics, in. the most striking manner, that however enormously 

 great the heavenly bodies appear to be to us, the space in which 

 they move is much more immense. 



One of our greatest astronomers, Maedler, expresses himself 

 thus : "What at present is only a nebular spot in the heavens, 

 ■will once shine as a galaxy, and there was once a time that nothing 

 existed in the universe but limitless nebular masses." This, in 

 part, is the true chaos of the ancient philosophers. 



The same Maedler* was the first who, 30 years ago, announced 

 to the scientific world that the enormous gravitation of the mass 

 of the sun itself, and the resulting compression of all its constit- 

 uent parts, must necessarily develop heat and light, and I think 

 we may go a step further, and say that the falling together, the 

 coalescense of the enormous amount of matter which now consti- 

 tutes our sun, must necessarily have developed heat enouirh to 

 last for some millions of years. The French naturalist, Buflbii, 

 more than a century ago, and Bischof recently, made a series of exper- 

 iments about the time necessary for large balls of different sizes, made 

 of cast iron and of basalt, to cool down from the white or red hot 

 state, trying to find the law of the relation between their size and 

 the time required for this cooling, deducing at last from these 

 experiments the conclusion, that for a body of the size of our 



•Maedler is a German by birth, and Imperial Russian astronomer at Dorpal. See his 

 Popular Astronomy, Berlin, 1S41, 4th edition, 1847, page 127. 



