THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF WORLDS 405 



straight through the limb of the sun and carry away a bit of its 

 flesh ? It was a tempting hypothesis, not in the least un- 

 scientific, easily possible in the existing state of knowledge. 



Buff on argues for his theory with tenacity and conviction, 

 and with all that grace of style which made him one of the 

 most widely known of writers upon natural science. But after 

 all it was only a guess ; it had no facts to go on. Nothing in 

 the way of subsequent discovery ever came to its support. But 

 it laid a solid foundation whereon others might rear a more 

 enduring fabric. The central fact which Buff on had laid bare, 

 not indeed with firm proof but with a high degree of probability, 

 was that the matter of our solar world at least is of the same 

 piece. It was a hundred years before it could be proved ; but 

 his surmise set men thinking, and led others to happier results. 



A few years before Buff on, the mathematician Maupertuis 

 had drawn attention to the curious shape of some of the vague 

 nebulous masses which no telescope of the period could resolve 

 into separate stars. Some of them appeared to have a figure 

 like that of an oval or ellipse. If Buffon had not been so hot 

 upon the trail of his sun-scraping comet, he might have seen 

 that here was a hint of value. He let it go by. In the far 

 away little university town of Konigsberg, on the upper edge 

 of Germany, there was a young philosopher with a teeming 

 brain to read after him with better eyes. 



The early years of the century had seen a lively polemic 

 among the mathematicians over what the French call forces 

 vives that is, the energy contained in a body in motion. It 

 really bore on the ground principles of a rational dynamics. 

 Galileo had laid the foundations ; Huyghens, Leibnitz, and 

 Bernouilli had made important contributions ; the matter was 

 finally planted on a firm basis, not subsequently to be dis- 

 turbed, by Euler in 1736 and d'Alembert in 1743. 



But the old Cartesian ideas were still floating about, ghosts 

 from a once splendid fabrication which the Newtonian philo- 

 sophy had woefully undone. A few years after d'Alembert, 

 a young man fresh from his university studies dashed into the 

 arena with an effort to bring back life to the ghosts. One does 

 not readily recognise under this guise the familiar figure of the 

 metaphysician, Immanuel Kant. He was born in Konigsberg, 

 the son of a saddler ; as his name indicates, of Scottish descent. 



