A RATIONAL COSMOGONY 151 



the solar repulsion of her center of gravity? How can 

 molten bodies be disrupted by tides, when their cen- 

 ters of gravity are always nearest the attracting body? 

 Why should we not seek to explain current happenings 

 by current forces, instead of borrowing causes from 

 the past? Why should we assume that the sun is not 

 an organic part of the sideral system? Why do we 

 say that the sun revolves around the common center 

 of gravity of the system, and then straightway con- 

 found that revolution with an impossible axial rota 

 tion? Why do we proclaim that Mars has no oceans, 

 in the face of his great snow-caps that belie us? Why 

 say that the Moon has an igneous surface and no oceans, 

 instead of leaping to the obvious truth that its oceans 

 are missing because they have congealed? Is it pos- 

 sible, I ask myself, that these things, seemingly so 

 simple, are not true? that the generality of men find 

 them harder to believe in than whirling vacua? or ever- 

 lasting inertia! motions down a spiral? or suns boiling 

 and contracting at one and the same time? or suns 

 heated to incandescence by snow-storms more frigid still 

 than arctic? or an earth with a core 200,000 in tem- 

 perature yet immune against explosion? or a sun grow- 

 ing hotter and hotter by contraction due to cooling? or 

 film tides? or earth and moon steadily receding from 

 each other by virtue of their mutual attraction? 



