RECENT COSMOGONIES 255 



such ring exists there can be no tide ; hence the sun could, 

 technically, bear no tides, however favorable to their 

 creation the physical circumstances might appear to be, 

 for the simple reason that he has no equatorial protuber- 

 ance. The learned Doctor could, indeed, reply that the 

 ancestral sun might, for all that, have had such a pro- 

 tuberance but then, again, it might not. 



The next question to settle is as to which was the 

 vera causa of this planet-creating convulsion that Doctor 

 Chamberlin describes was it the tidal perturbation or 

 the internal disrupting force? The Doctor himself does 

 not make it at all clear which is which, inasmuch as he de- 

 picts the duration and progress of the process, not in ac- 

 cordance with the well-known spasmodic, violent, and 

 lawless peculiarities of explosive action, but with the 

 smooth curve of tidal flow and ebb. Although, quanti- 

 tatively, the tidal force could not have amounted to more 

 than one-millionth of the strength of the eruptive energy 

 requisite to project the planets, all at one time, into their 

 respective orbits, yet he sets up the lesser agent as the 

 controller for the methodical liberation of the greater! 

 Granting that the tidal agitation supplied exactly the 

 stimulus requisite to call the alleged eruptive forces into 

 action, then the latter should have broken loose, not in 

 the modulated manner of a tidal swell, as pictured by our 

 author, but in a sudden and maximal outburst, from 

 which there would follow not gradual intensification of 

 the action, but, rather, gradual subsidence to the normal 

 state of quiescence. In short, he makes the tail wag the 

 dog. 



Next, let us compare these two dynamical agencies 

 quantitatively: To project all the planets into their re- 

 spective orbits would obviously demand the expenditure 

 of precisely as much thermal (explosive) energy as would 

 be generated by their fall thence into the sun. It so hap- 

 pens that this has already been computed for us by Sir 

 Robert Ball (Story of the Heavens, p. 520) : 



Were Jupiter to fall into the sun enough heat would be 

 thereby produced to scorch the whole solar system, while all the 

 planets together would be capable of producing heat whichT, if 



