234 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



save on one perilous assumption, namely, that the ether, 

 or some other cosmic medium mingled with it, is opposing 

 the free passage of the revolving bodies. 



It may strike the lay reader as paradoxical to be told 

 that the acceleration of an orbitally revolving body can be 

 explained by its retardation, but the acrobatic astronomer 

 of to-day is equal to any emergency. His explanation is, 

 that a body so retarded in its orbit is thereby forced to 

 fall to a lower level, where, he tells us, under the mystical 

 law of conservation of areas, "it is natural for bodies to 

 move and revolve faster than at greater distances/' Not 

 only, says he, does the resisted body miraculously re- 

 cover the velocity lost, but it actually acquires a tangen- 

 tial velocity greater even than at first! Such is "celes- 

 tial ' ' mechanics ! 



In addition to thus cajoling themselves into believing 

 that retardation makes for speed, just as Lane persuaded 

 them that the sun, by cooling, becomes all the hotter, our 

 learned doctrinaires, proceeding along the same lines, 

 have succeeded in convincing themselves that a concomi- 

 tant effect of this process is to cause the orbit of the re- 

 tarded body to become more and more rounded. 



This myth is the chief text and stock in trade of our 

 author, who, in spite of his affectation of originality, is 

 quite prosaically orthodox. He conceives the planets and 

 the satellites, whose orbits are all subcircular, to have 

 nucleated in the borders of the nebula, on the order of a 

 trillion miles distant from the central sun, and thence to 

 have descended through the nebular matter, which he de- 

 fines as increasing in density toward the middle. At 

 first, he says, their orbits were very elongated, but as they 

 severally came nearer and nearer to the sun, they en- 

 countered stiffer and stiffer resistance from the nebular 

 matter enveloping them, causing them to fall to still lower 

 levels, and consequently to hasten their velocity and take 

 on greater rotundity of orbit. To quote him again : 



In the writer's recent researches on the origin of the solar 

 system, however, it has been shown that the orbits of the embryo 

 planets were originally hundreds and perhaps thousands of times 



