ii8 SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 



attenuated that all coherence would be out of the 

 question. 



Not only, accordingly, would centrifugal force 

 fail to give the planets the right spin, but it would 

 fail to form planets at all. Miss Agnes M. Clerke, 

 in Modern Cosmogonies^ puts the matter very 

 clearly : " We know perfectly that a rotating globe 

 of matter, thousands of times less compact than air, 

 would intermittently disintegrate at the surface 

 with the progress of acceleration. The disturbance 

 and restoration of equilibrium would be virtually 

 simultaneous. There would be no accumulation 

 of internal stress, and consequently no definitely 

 separated epochs of instability. At the first solicita- 

 tion, at the first instant that centrifugal velocity 

 gained the upper hand over gravity, nebulous wisps 

 would have become detached, and their detachment 

 would have gone on without pause. Space would 

 have been strewn with the debris of condens- 

 ing nebula, and there should have resulted a vast 

 cloud of cosmic dust, not a majestic array of revolv- 

 ing spheres." 



Moreover, by the " law of areas " the rate of 

 rotation of the fire-mist must have been extremely 

 slow when it occupied the enormous area measured 

 by Neptune's orbit, so that really gravitation would 

 have more than counterbalanced centrifugal force, 

 until the whole mass had shrunk to the size of the 



