THE AUTHOR'S THEORIES OUTLINED 35 



that mysterious "lateral pressure" by which mountain 

 ranges are known to be lifted up, but whose dynamical 

 origin has till the present day remained shrouded in 

 mystery. 



Let us pass now to the contemplation of the nebula 

 out of which our solar system is presumed to have been 

 gestated and apply to its study the same principles we 

 have just been considering; and for the sake of simplicity 

 let us picture it as having sprung from a spontaneous 

 explosion of an ancestral sun to a size, say, double the 

 diameter of Neptune's orbit. 



Naturally the first query to arise at this point is as 

 to whether a disintegrated cloud of dust can ever fairly 

 be treated as a parallel case to that of a compact globe 

 like our earth. To this question I reply in the affirma- 

 tive, basing my judgment on these considerations : 



1. Enormous as is the breadth of the solar system, 

 being no less than five thousand millions of miles across, 

 its span is still only 1-5000 the distance of the nearest 

 star. This extreme isolation Newton must have sensed 

 (though, of course, he did not definitely know) and it 

 doubtless misled him into the fatal error of construing 

 the solar family as a universe unto itself wholly cut off 

 from and independent of the rest of the cosmos. In my 

 philosophy, on the contrary, this isolation is an essential 

 factor toward constituting our system into a gravita- 

 tional unit y that is to say, a group of associated bodies 

 tethered together ~by their mutual attractions and seek- 

 ing their lowest common center of gravity ivith refer- 

 ence to the goal of their cosmic fall. 



2. In its quality of penetration, gravitation is 

 unique. It does not vary with the area of the surface 

 presented, but with the mass : a nail standing on its head 

 on the scale weighs precisely the same as when lying on 

 its side. For this reason a solid body like the earth re- 

 acts to the Prime Resultant (i. e., the stellar resultant be- 

 longing specifically to our system) as " molecular ly" as 

 though scattered into cosmic dust. Herein lies the dif- 



