COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



breadth of the ideal zone occupied by their 

 orbits is about 100,000,000 miles, its extreme 

 breadth reaches 250,000,000 miles. While the 

 orbit of Europa is more nearly circular than 

 any of the orbits of the true planets, on the 

 other hand the orbit of Polyhymnia attains an 

 almost cometary eccentricity, the difference be- 

 tween its perihelion and aphelion being nearly 

 200,000,000 miles. 



There is one other circumstance, however, 

 which my hypothesis thus far fails to explain. 

 While the true planets revolve in planes but 

 slightly inclined to the ecliptic — the orbit of 

 Mercury showing an inclination of about seven 

 degrees as the maximum instance — the aster- 

 oids, on the contrary, revolve in planes of quite 

 various degrees of inclination, the orbit of Pallas 

 rising above the ecliptic at an angle of thirty- 

 four degrees. As the disturbing attraction of 

 Jupiter, however various in direction, would 

 seem to have been exerted wholly in one plane, 

 1 am unable to account for this diversity of in- 

 clinations. Yet in spite of this shortcoming in 

 the hypothesis — which might perhaps be re- 

 moved by some one more thoroughly conversant 

 with dynamics — all the other circumstances in 

 the case point unmistakably to the forcible rup- 

 ture of the genetic ring by the attraction ex- 

 erted by Jupiter ; and thus it would seem that, 

 just when such an untoward event in the his- 

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