232 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



Naval Observatory at Mare Island, California, in the 

 course of his extensive researches came upon this long- 

 forgotten article of Babinet 's and brought it again to the 

 attention of the scientific world. Even then it would have 

 received no consideration, it is safe to say, either from 

 Doctor See himself or from other professional scientists 

 had the Hypothesis not in the meantime become dis- 

 credited by the discovery of Phobos, the resolution of the 

 Saturnian rings into discrete particles, and the revelation 

 of the existence of retrograde motions in the system. 



Adopting Babinet 's criterion as final and conclusive, 

 Dr. See reasoned that since the planets and satellites 

 could not possibly have been flung off by the centrifugal 

 rotation of the solar nebula, there was but one other way 

 by which they could have become members of the sun ? s 

 family, and that was by capture or, in other words, by 

 falling inward toward the sun from a great distance. If, 

 he argued, the sun could directly form out of the cosmic 

 dust, why not the planets, satellites and comets, severally 

 and independently? It requires but little reflection to see 

 that to give plausibility to this scheme, if for no other 

 reason, the original nebula would have to be expanded to 

 vastly greater dimensions than that of Laplace, and ac- 

 cordingly Dr. See himself affirms, that "it was between 

 one trillion and five trillion miles in radius." 



It was not only obligatory but natural for Doctor See 

 to seek to correlate, as part of his cosmogonical scheme, 

 all the modern developments of the science. One of these 

 innovations was, of course, the doctrine of light and 

 electrical repulsion. Laplace, as you know, had taken his 

 nebula for granted ; but this, Dr. See supplies by deriva- 

 tion from the impalpable dust expelled from the stars 

 "gathering into clouds in the opposite parts of the 

 heavens. ' ' His nebula, then, differs fundamentally from 

 that of Laplace in being of the meteoroidal and not the 

 gaseous type a very material distinction, especially in 

 relation to the applicability of the Helmholtzian explana- 

 tion of the solar heat. 



In Chapter I (q. v.) I quoted from Spencer and 

 Fiske, showing how they respectively sought to account 



