70 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



matician than Newton) was universally hailed as the su- 

 preme st conception of man, but we have lived to see it 

 laid aside. Newton, too, hero-worshiping reader, was 

 ordinary flesh and blood like ourselves, and fallible even 

 as Ptolemy and Laplace. Not only that, but he lived in an 

 age when the bible was still regarded as a scientific 

 authority ; when the Inquisition was not yet dead ; when 

 witch-burning was a religious rite ; when the earth and 

 the entire solar system were generally believed to be only 

 a few thousand years old ; when Uranus, Neptune and the 

 asteroids had not yet been discovered; when the sun's 

 motion was not even guessed ; when the spectroscope was 

 undreamed of ; before the mechanical theory of heat was 

 discovered ; before the accuracy of his law of the inverse 

 square had been impugned ; and before his theory of tides 

 had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Shall 

 we now wave aside these important considerations, and, 

 with the bigot's finality, proclaim that "Newton's science 

 is good enough for us", and that, hedged about though he 

 was with the narrow limitations of his age, he could com- 

 mit no error ? Now that we know so many more basic 

 astronomical facts than Newton did, why should we seek 

 to crowd them all into the superstructure of theory only, 

 rather than to employ them in broadening, strengthen- 

 ing, repairing, and remodeling the foundations that stand 

 in such sore need of attention! 



It seems wonderfully strange to me that, of all the 

 brilliant minds that have heretofore applied themselves 

 to the theory of astronomy since Newton, not one has so 

 much as suggested the utilization of the energy inherent 

 in our cosmic fall to account for the gyrations of the 

 planets and satellites, and especially for their multitudi- 

 nous concordances. Following the lead of Newton, one 

 after another of them has fallen blindly into line and kept 

 in the same old rut. Newton, of course, is more to be ex- 

 cused than the rest ; for he was not in possession of cer- 

 tain essential factors, and, besides, he was so far ahead of 

 his own generation that not even his modest postulate 

 that gravitation extends as far as the moon was accepted 

 by it during his lifetime, though he survived, as was 



