RECENT COSMOGONIES 259 



miles, and if to Neptune's, more than a billion. All this 

 calculation is based on the exaggerated supposition that 

 a tide upon the sun comparable to that the latter pro- 

 duces upon the earth would have sufficed to pry open a 

 crust which, until then, had been able to resist the inces- 

 sant straining of a jinnee a million times stronger. That 

 Doctor Chamberlin himself is thinking of a compara- 

 tively weak tide sufficiently appears from his mild ex- 

 pressions : "For its partner in action let a more massive 

 star be chosen" * * * "only a quite distant approach,'* 

 and "let it be so dense and inert that its response to the 

 reaction of the sun upon it may be neglected." 



In one of his veiled allusions to Professor Bicker- 

 ton's theory, our author seeks to emphasize the greater 

 probability of a "near approach" over actual collision, in 

 which contention he is clearly justified. But, though the 

 argument against the probabilities of his own hypothe- 

 sis is thereby relatively weakened, it still remains strong 

 enough to overthrow his, too. In order to facilitate the 

 calculation, let us assume for the maximum field of "ef- 

 fective approach" a diameter of 200,000,000 miles, then 

 the area of our original postulated diaphragm would be 

 to it in the ratio of 200 2 to 26,000,000 2 , or as 1 to 16,900, 

 000,000, which latter number being squared and then mul- 

 tiplied by 50, as previously explained in the discussion of 

 Professor Bickerton's hypothesis, yields the probabilities 

 against even such an approach as 14,265,500,000,000,000, 

 000,000, to one ! 



Next to the supreme problem of the origin, mainte- 

 nance, and regulation of the planetary motions, comes 

 that of the source of the solar heat. Heretofore it has 

 been the aim of cosmologists to seek a solution of both 

 these problems concurrently and compatibly, but Doctor 

 Chamberlin has unique ideas of his own. Though os- 

 tensibly professing to believe in the classical division of 

 energy into potential and kinetic, and that old stars are 

 thermally impoverished and moribund, he naively makes 

 our ancestral and presumably senile sun overturn the 

 order of things and hurl the planets into their distant 



