218 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



have made a physical investigation of the tides reluc- 

 tantly report it to be, and as I think I have deductively 

 demonstrated it to be, of course the Planetesimal hypoth- 

 esis is false also, and it would seem that nothing more 

 need be said. The tenacity of inherited opinions, how- 

 ever, is unfortunately often far more powerful in mold- 

 ing human opinion than truth itself, and so it becomes 

 necessary to subject the theory in question to a test by 

 the standards generally recognized, whether those stand- 

 ards be, in fact, genuine or spurious. 



In a former place it was pointed out that, according 

 to Newton's Corollary, the height of the tide is a function 

 of the thickness of the equatorial ring, and that where no 

 such ring exists there can be no tide ; hence the sun could, 

 technically, bear no tides, however favorable to their 

 creation the physical circumstances might appear to be, 

 for the simple reason that he has no equatorial protuber- 

 ance. The learned Doctor could, indeed, reply that the 

 ancestral sun might, for all that, have had such a pro- 

 tuberance but then, again, it might not. 



The next question to settle is as to which was the 

 vera causa of this planet-creating convulsion that Doctor 

 Chamberlin describes was it the tidal perturbation or 

 the internal disrupting force? The Doctor himself does 

 not make it at all clear which is which, inasmuch as he de- 

 picts the duration and progress of the process, not in ac- 

 cordance with the well-known spasmpdic, violent, and 

 lawless peculiarities of explosive action, but with the 

 smooth curve of tidal flow and ebb. Although, quanti- 

 tatively, the tidal force could not have amounted to more 

 than one-millionth of the strength of the eruptive energy 

 requisite to project the planets, all at one time, into their 

 respective orbits, yet he sets up the lesser agent as the 

 controller for the methodical liberation of the greater! 

 Granting that the tidal agitation supplied exactly the 

 stimulus requisite to call the alleged eruptive forces into 

 action, then the latter should have broken loose, not in 

 the modulated manner of a tidal swell, as pictured by our 

 author, but in a sudden and maximal outburst, from 

 which there would follow not gradual intensification of 



