FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



ter in the several bodies of sun and planets, and the gravitating 

 powers resulting from thence; the several distances of the primary 

 planets from the sun and of the secondary ones from Saturn, 

 Jupiter and the earth, and the velocities with which those planets 

 could revolve about those quantities of matter in those central 

 bodies; and to compare and adjust all these things together in so 

 great variety of bodies, argues that cause to be not blind and 

 fortuitous, but very well skilled in mechanics and geometry. 



This enforced appeal of Newton's to supernatural 

 agency to supply the chasms in his theory may have 

 contented the two or three generations immediately suc- 

 ceeding him, but when a few score years later the new 

 science of Geology had demonstrated the immense age of 

 our planet, men's ideas of nature underwent a great 

 philosophic change and they sought to escape altogether 

 from the trammels of the Mosaic doctrine. Cutting 

 themselves adrift, then, from the notion of a special 

 creation, they attacked the old problems anew, as logi- 

 cally they were compelled to do. They asked themselves 

 once more : How came the moon into her motion ? How 

 are we to explain the marvelously exact adjustments 

 between the strength of gravity upon her on the one hand 

 and her mass and velocity on the other ? How came she, 

 indeed, to be placed just where she is! What consti- 

 tutes the "centrifugal force" by which she is enabled to 

 react against the earth's gravity from year to year and 

 age to age without sacrifice to her momentum ? 



It was just at this crisis that they should have be- 

 thought themselves of the one crucial factor that had not 

 yet been considered by Newton ; but if they thought of it 

 at all, they probably spurned it as only an additional 

 difficulty of which they seemed then to have enough. 

 That factor was the stellar resultant. Not knowing any- 

 thing else to do, they resorted to shallow dogmatism : 

 " Rectilinear motions", they decreed, "are self -existent 

 and do not require explanation". This illuminating pro- 

 nouncement runs current in all the so-called orthodox 

 works on astronomy, and in corroboration I will quote 

 here from two of them. The first excerpt is from the 

 leading text-book on astronomy, by Doctor Charles 



