380 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



minds, to the imaginary transplanting of a strong man 

 from here to the moon, where his power to lift weights 

 would be sextupled. 



Struthiously shutting our eyes, as the astronomers 

 here do, to all the ifs and ands by which this ingenious 

 deduction has been arrived at, let us provisionally accept 

 it as true and see how well or ill it fulfills the require- 

 ments. 



In the first place, there is the planet Mars, which is 

 midway in mass between the earth and moon, yet not a 

 single crater or, in fact, any protuberant irregularity at 

 all has yet been descried upon his surface! Judging 

 from these two bodies, Mars and the moon alone, then, 

 we should naturally conclude that the smaller the cosmic 

 body the more rugged. But proceeding another step 

 higher, we find this rule already violated ; for the earth is 

 very much rougher than Mars, yet far less so than our 

 satellite. Now, inasmuch as our Vulcanists are uni- 

 versally agreed in holding that our planet, too, is a 

 shrinking body and that the asperities on her surface 

 are due solely to this cause and the kindred cause of vol- 

 canic upheaval, it follows that the only salvation for the 

 Volcanic hypothesis is to establish that the moon, when 

 she gained her supposed separate existence, must have 

 been far hotter than Mars and at least as hot as the 

 parturient earth. In fine, the Vulcanists are logically 

 forced to be Tidal-evolutionists, and their theory conse- 

 quently rests on Darwin's admittedly "wild speculation 

 impossible of verification ". 



Secondly, investigation has shown that the earth's 

 temperature rises one degree for every sixty feet of 

 depth, and it is only fair to presume that this rule held 

 relatively true throughout her postulated contracting 

 process. Judging by the existing gradient, the tempera- 

 ture at the earth's center should be about 320,000 degrees 

 F. as against, say, 550, absolute, near the surface. If, 

 now, we conceive the earth to be divided into 81 concen- 

 tric strata, all of them of equal mass, the temperature of 

 the outermost should average only that degree marking 



