218 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



of Phobos in order to learn from that midget so rudimen- 

 tary a lesson I But let us expose to ourselves the full ex- 

 tent of our recent folly in the hope of deriving wisdom not 

 to go on perpetrating similar lunacies in the future. 



To begin with, what think you was the degree of 

 density of the postulated nebula! This is easy of cal- 

 culation. Spheres being to each other as their cubes, and 

 Neptune's distance from the sun being 6400 times the 

 solar radius, it follows, that when the nebula filled the 

 Neptunian orbit, every cubic inch of the sun's substance 

 was dispersed in a cubical space 533 feet each way, that 

 is to say, a space whose six sides are each equal to a large- 

 sized city block ! Imagine a great air-tght box of this 

 magnitude, filled with air of sea-level density, and then 

 imagine this air pumped out and condensed into liquid 

 form ; it would fill a hall sixty feet each way. Reserve but 

 two tablespoonfuls of this liquid (pouring all the rest 

 away) and heat the same as hot as your imagination can 

 picture, and then inject it back again into the big ex- 

 hausted space from which it was pumped, and you will 

 have a mathematically accurate idea of the nature of the 

 Laplacian nebula! Physicists inform us that, despite 

 their utmost care and ingenuity, they are unable to pro- 

 duce artificial vacua within 1-1000 part as tenuous as this. 

 Let fall from your eyes, I pray, the glasses of prejudice 

 and look, and, looking, do some sane and sincere thinking. 

 Do you, in your inmost soul, believe that such a hyper- 

 vacuum could and actually did rotate on its axis LIKE A 

 RIGID SOLID and, so rotating, fling off great rings by cen- 

 trifugal force ? Have you in all your reading come upon 

 a fairy story, a superstition, a dream, an hallucination so 

 utterly abandoned and nonsensical as this? Yet for 

 nearly a century has this absurdity been taught by a 

 science that prides itself upon being the only " exact" 

 one outside of mathematics ! If this be astronomy, then 

 let astrology be hailed as true gospel. 



Let us now inquire what is the extent of the sun 's at- 

 traction at the distance of Neptune, in order to ascertain 

 the degree of "hydrostatic pressure" brought to bear on 



