86 THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 
a magnetic field around this metallic globe (insulated with a few \ 
miles of sand and water). ‘This field will carry in the twentieth 
century messages round the world. 
The progressive stages which we have been here considering 
have, in the case of our moon, which, by a separate nucleus, was 
formed in a like manner as our earth, and by its rapid rotation 
around its magnetic center, our earth, coupled with its revolution 
with us round the sun, has passed sooner than us through the com- 
plete course of formation from highly rarified dimagnetic gas (we 
have no language for another state, for we do not know another 
state—we have only the manifestations which constitute the sum of 
our present knowledge) to a cold solid, for the moon has passed 
through the stage of the formation of water from her atmosphere, 
and her atmosphere has lost all its dimagnetism, and has, as one 
might say, been absorbed, and so have her oceans. Her surface is 
oxidized metals, and the deathlike stillness of those majestic wastes 
which so charm the astronomer are deathlike indeed, for dust and 
ashes is the surface of that obsolete world. And we too will prob- 
ably follow our moon ; we will absorb our atmosphere and our oceans, 
and then it will swing as one of the moons of the sun until 
We have considered the chemical, as we call it, separation of 
the elements of the parent nebula; we have only considered the part 
of the nebula which became our earth. The other planets, while 
they followed the same process will not have had the same compo- 
sition, the various elements which constitute the chromosphere and 
corona, and as a sequence the body of the sun, are not all known to 
us, and even if they were it would still leave us able to apportion 
them among the planets. The outer peripheries of the nebular area 
surrounding the sun would be of the most dimagnetic, or to use the 
language most familiar, the most rarified elements, that is, the ones © 
capable of being dispersed to the greatest extent. These rings of 
matter as they whirled in the vortex of the solar area gathered in 
centres of a polarization of the degree consequent on their composi- 
tion, and what we called the lighter planets would be on the outer 
circles of revolution, because the sun would be exerting a dimagnetic 
influence at that period, and the light elements would be able to go 
into a globular mass around a magnetic nucleus, then, whereas, 
later, when the sun became as we say cooler, they could not ; hence 
