198 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



This myth is the chief text and stock in trade of our 

 author, who, in spite of his affectation of originality, is 

 quite prosaically orthodox. He conceives the planets and 

 the satellites, whose orbits are all subcircular, to have 

 nucleated in the borders of the nebula, on the order of a 

 trillion miles distant from the central sun, and thence to 

 have descended through the nebular matter, which he de- 

 fines as increasing in density toward the middle. At 

 first, he says, their orbits were very elongated, but as they 

 severally came nearer and nearer to the sun, they en- 

 countered stiffer and stiffer resistance from the nebular 

 matter enveloping them, causing them to fall to still lower 

 levels, and consequently to hasten their velocity and take 

 on greater rotundity of orbit. To quote him again : 



In the writer's recent researches on the origin of the solar 

 system, however, it has been shown that the orbits of the embryo 

 planets were originally hundreds and perhaps thousands of times 

 larger than they are now, and have since been reduced in size 

 and rounded up by the secular action of the resisting medium 

 formerly pervading our system. As the planetary orbits were 

 once of vast extent, and have since contracted their dimensions, 

 it follows that the embryo planets once formed a connecting linE 

 with the present system of comets. In the course of immeasur- 

 able ages, the planetary system contracted its dimension enor- 

 mously, and at the same time eat out the interior portion of the 

 primordial solar nebula ; leaving about the sun and planets a hol- 

 low shell of nebulosity, from which, under the effects of certain 

 mutual perturbations, fragments drop down to visit us occa- 

 sionally. These are the comets, and this is why they come from 

 the shell or envelope at a great distance from the sun, an observed 

 fact which has puzzled astronomers and mathematicians for cen- 

 turies. 



In explanation of the axial rotations of the planets 

 he says: 



We may conceive that there is revolving about each planet 

 a vortex of cosmical dust, some of which falls against the surface 

 of the globe, and thereby accelerates its axial rotation. As the 

 predominant motion of the vortex is forward, the planet's rota- 

 tion naturally tends to become direct and the obliquity tends to 

 disappear. 



Doctor See's own appraisal of his theory can be 

 gathered from this, his concluding paragraph : 



