THE SUN 253 



possibility indeed, but with a great comet. The comet 

 of 1840-1841 may have been such a one, and had it been 

 fired by its parent star a shade more accurately, it might 

 have struck the sun amidship, punctured his inflated 

 integument, and precipitated upon us a dire calamity. 



THE GENESIS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM 



In such catastrophic explosions of the sun, then, be 

 their causes what they may, we have the secret of the 

 genesis of the nuclei of the planets and the method by 

 which these nuclei have been gradually built up into the 

 great bodies we now see. The planets were not created 

 full-grown and full-panoplied, but they have added layer 

 on layer, development to development. Indeed, every 

 biological and geological fact proclaims the truth of this 

 dictum, as every well-informed scientist will freely con- 

 cede. The objections to the hypothesis of self -explosion 

 on the part of the sun in the past and its heretofore total 

 exclusion from consideration, have not been on account 

 of any intrinsic defect, but because it left out of the 

 reckoning the origination of the rotatory motions of the 

 systems and, besides, contravened the dogma of the con- 

 servation of energy. The first of these objections is met 

 by the newly-discovered principle of the Prime Eesult- 

 ant ; the second will be considered in a following chapter. 



The pent-up gases, escaping as they do in these 

 catastrophic cases from under a hydrostatic pressure of 

 millions of atmospheres, in tearing their way through 

 the superincumbent 25,000-mile shell naturally carry with 

 them billions upon billions of tons of solar magma in 

 various stages of metallurgical reduction, according to 

 the solar level from which they respectively emanate. 

 No doubt the major part of this upheaved material falls 

 back upon the sun, but a vast amount of it is carried on 

 outward past Mercury, past Venus, past the earth, on 

 even to Neptune, the outermost planet spreading itself 

 into a disc-shaped nebula as it goes ; disc-shaped because 

 the sun-spots are known to seek the solar equator. In- 

 deed, some of these ejecta do not even remain within the 



