THE PRIME EESULTANT 123 



north. Nor is this the whole story ; for on keener scrutiny 

 it will be discovered that the ecliptic is not sinking in 

 continuous parallelism with itself, but is tilting at the 

 rate of a small fraction of a second per annum, betoken- 

 ing in my opinion not a secular change, but a revolutional 

 movement on the part of the Gravisphere, not, however, 

 on its axis, but around a "centrum," vastly remote, in- 

 deed, yet not insusceptible of a rough approximation both 

 as to location and distance. 



A logarithmic spiral is denned as one that intersects 

 all radiants at the same angle. This is precisely the en- 

 semble arrangement we should expect of the planets in 

 their orbits at successive instants of time, if, as I have 

 been arguing, the planets are truly balancing themselves 

 as a composite unit on the pivot of their lowest center of 

 gravity. Strangely enough, astronomers have lately 

 shown that spiral nebulae (which for this purpose possess 

 an advantage in having continuous arms to guide the eye, 

 whereas a system like ours has only points) conform to 

 this very shape. 



It may be objected by some of my readers that the 

 axis of the sun, Jupiter, and Uranus are not at all in 

 alignment with the earth's axis. The objection, on the 

 face of it, is sound and legitimate, and deserves a cate- 

 gorical answer. Let it be premised, however, that the 

 only planet enough like our earth in constitution to serve 

 for a criterion, to-wit, Mars, points its axis so nearly like 

 the earth's that Doctor Lowell, late director of the Flag- 

 staff Observatory, in a bulletin issued shortly before his 

 death, asserted that its inclination is identically that of 

 the earth's. Why this remarkable coincidence? Shall 

 it be waved aside as immaterial? Moreover, Saturn's 

 axial inclination is given by Flammarion as 25 42' as 

 against 23 27' for the earth. Close enough surely to 

 constitute a prima-facie case ! As far as the definite ex- 

 ceptions of the sun and Jupiter are concerned, I might 

 put astronomers in general on the defensive by saying, 

 truthfully, that Newtonian theory doesn't account for the 

 direction of even a single one of these axes, let alone for 



