58 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



Imagine that the entire universe consisted of but 

 two bodies the size of our sun, precisely alike in all 

 respects save that one possessed the property of gravi- 

 tation, and the other did not. According to current be- 

 lief, they would behave practically alike, at least below 

 their respective surfaces, and the gravitational power 

 of the first body would consequently be as though it 

 did not exist. Surely this cannot be true! For if it 

 be so, it means the overthrow of the doctrine of the 

 conservation of energy. Were gravity an ordinary force 

 it would act for a moment or a day and then cease. It 

 is not such a force, but one inherent in matter and per- 

 petual, so that its continuous operation must be 'con- 

 tinuously manifested. It so acts in the case of planetary 

 motion, and it must so act in the internal economy of 

 the individual planets. 



The spectroscope tells us that some nebulae are 

 self-luminous ; they must therefore be hot. How came 

 they to be so? Certainly not from impacts, as the 

 Kinetic theory presumes, for even the strongest scien- 

 tific imagination must recoil from the contemplation 

 of two free clouds of frigid dust bumping together with 

 a violence sufficient to raise them to incandescence! Nor 

 is it possible for science to assume that in the Beginning 

 the nebulae were incandescent, and have persisted so 

 throughout the infinitude of ages. Where and what are 

 the hidden celestial furnaces that fired them? 



However long the period they consume, Nature's 

 operations are always cyclical. Since all are agreed 

 that nebulae are the raw material out of which worlds 

 are formed, they must also be the debris of worlds that 

 have passed. The possibility that their heat ivas some- 

 how generated while they were in the world state is 

 therefore surely as likely to be true as that they ab- 

 sorbed it out of the depths of frigid space, or were 



