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Newton himself was so completely persuaded by this 

 evidence of the moon's being the mother of the tides that 

 it never occurred to him, nor indeed does it seem to have 

 occurred to anyone but the present writer, to cast about 

 for any other solution. That a new solution is impera- 

 tively demanded, however, is rendered certain by the can- 

 did confessions of the Newtonians themselves, who, after 

 two centuries of ceaseless striving to fit their theory to 

 nature, have been reluctantly constrained (v. p. 18) to 

 testify that the two are " utterly inreconcilable ". 



It is but one of many glaring inconsistencies of 

 modern astronomical science that, in spite of these and an 

 unlimited number of other such damning admissions of 

 the objective falsity of Newton's tidal theory, our scien- 

 tists nevertheless continue to teach it in the schools as 

 one of the great scientific gospels. All the so-called 

 modern cosmogonies the Planetesimal hypothesis of 

 Chamberlin and Moulton, Arrhenius' theory of Light- 

 Pressure, See 's hypothesis of a Resisting Medium, and 

 the rest, are based in whole or in part on this admittedly 

 false doctrine. Indeed, in the very book in which he 

 gave utterance to the paragraphs just quoted, Darwin 

 goes on and elaborates his grotesque theory of Tidal 

 Evolution, of which, in concluding, he himself speaks in 

 these slighting words (The Tides, p. 284) : 



There is nothing to tell us whether this theory affords the 

 true explanation of the birth of the moon, and I say that it is 

 only a wild speculation incapable of verification. 



To cap the climax of absurdity, the article Tides in 

 the new Britannica was contributed by this same Darwin, 

 and it is given up almost wholly to the exploitation of this 

 "wild speculation incapable of verification" to the ex- 

 clusion of virtually all other pertinent matter ! What a 

 travesty is this on science ! Here we have, in chronologi- 

 cal order: first, Newton 's theory ; second, universal ad- 

 mission of its unsoundness ; third, a complicated elabora- 

 tion of the theory by one who had already condemned it ; 

 fourth, condemnation of the elaboration by its own 

 author ; and fifth, the memorializing of the author and 



