VIII 



EECENT COSMOGONIES 



THE CAPTURE THEORY 



KEPLER'S second law, namely, that the radius vec- 

 tor of the several planets passes over equal areas 

 in equal times, has since been generalized to in- 

 clude all circulating cosmic bodies, and is usually re- 

 ferred to as the law of the conservation of areas, or the 

 law of the conservation of moment of momentum. It ap- 

 pears that through some unaccountable oversight neither 

 Laplace or those who came after him ever thought of ap- 

 plying this test to the Nebular Hypothesis until the year 

 1861, when the French physicist, Jacques Babinet (1794- 

 1872), contributed an article to the Comptes Rendus, in 

 which he showed that the Laplacian conception grossly 

 violated that requirement, and that when the sun was 

 supposedly expanded to the orbit of Neptune, or to the or- 

 bits of any of the nearer planets, the rotation was much 

 too slow to detach any of them by centrifugal force. At 

 that time, however, such was the prestige of Laplace and 

 his cosmogony that Babinet 's work received but scant 

 consideration, and even Babinet himself kept on teaching 

 the same old fallacy, notwithstanding, until his dying 

 day; much as Sir George H. Darwin did the Newtonian 

 tidal theory, which he himself had so conclusively dis- 

 proved. Tradition, it seems, can blindfold the best. 



