THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS 217 



retrievable was on its way. In 1877, Prof. Asaph Hall, 

 of Washington, discovered the two moons of the planet 

 Mars, Deimos and Phobos, neither one of them more than 

 seven miles in diameter, and incidentally ascertained that 

 the latter (and inner) of these revolves around its pri- 

 mary more than three times as rapidly as the planet ro- 

 tates on its own axis. Some five years later, Keeler 

 proved, spectroscopically, what Clerk Maxwell had pre- 

 viously shown deductively, that the rings of Saturn are 

 neither liquid or solid, as theretofore supposed, but con- 

 sist of multitudes of minute satellites, and that the inner 

 ones revolve faster than the planet rotates on its axis. 

 These two incompatible facts, added to the more recent 

 discoveries of the so-called retrograde motions of three 

 or four of the satellites, and taken in connection with its 

 violation of the doctrine of conservation of moment of 

 moments, have virtually given the Hypothesis its quietus. 



CRITICISM OF THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS 



You may ask, of what use is further criticism of 

 Laplace's Hypothesis if the death blow has already been 

 administered? My answer is, that science has not yet 

 sufficiently learned the lessons the career and final fate 

 of the Hypothesis are capable of teaching. The truth is, 

 it should never have required killing ; it was too fatuously 

 and inherently absurd on its face to have merited more 

 than passing consideration. Of what use is it to postu- 

 late the axiomatically impossible and then to ring the 

 changes on it for a century, only to learn in the end, by 

 painful experience, what was but too glaringly patent at 

 the outset! I give everybody out of Bedlam credit for 

 knowing, a priori, that a gaseous nebula six billion miles 

 across, far thinner than atmospheric air, could by no pos- 

 sibility, whether in the past, the present, or the future, 

 rotate like a solid, spontaneously and without motive 

 power, for thousands of years on end ! If our intelligence 

 cannot teach us obvious things like this, it can teach us 

 nothing, and we may as well give up all efforts at learn- 

 ing. Should scientists have needed to await the discovery 



