194 Transactions.— Miscellaneous. 
provide him with that. But I will tell you, in confidence, that although we 
have not dared yet to put it in black and white, yet, in our discussions, we 
have even hinted that Laplace may have been altogether wrong, and have 
whispered many, many reasons, on modern views of energy and the 
dynamical theory of gases, why we think so. I will tell you one. Accord- 
ing to Laplace, the surface of the nebulous sun should go on getting faster 
and faster as ring after ring was thrown off; but, as a matter of fact, the 
sun's energy of rotation is only one fifty-thousandth part of that necessary 
to throw off a ring, and those among us who believe in the conservation of 
energy, ask, where is that energy gone? It is thought possible that not 
only may bodies thus be set travelling around the central mass, but that 
frequently the resultant velocity left in them may carry them quite away 
from it altogether. It is suggested that possibly the comets and shooting- 
stars whieh iluminate our sky may have been thrown off at the birth of 
temporary stars or systems, and as they travel through space come acci- 
dentally into our Solar System, and are sometimes kept within it by the 
retarding action of an approaching planet, or by some other cause. Almost 
certainly they were not born with the Sun and planets ; for, of all the comets 
observed, as many go against the direction of the planets as with it, so we 
really must consider the comets as foreign intruders, and as such treat them 
with the contempt they deserve. But you will say millions of millions of 
meteorites strike the earth each year ;—exactly, probably scarcely a stellar 
collision has occurred which did not strew space with millions of homeless 
particles left to wander recklessly through space, until they met destruction 
at the hands of some pitying cosmical shark, who sympathized with them 
in their loneliness and so took them in. But if there is so much dust flying 
about space, it must interfere seriously with our view when we look at very 
distant objects, as muddy water is opaque if deep. Struve held manfully to 
his opinion, based on good evidence, that distant light did suffer extinction; 
and does this not appear to offer a very good reason for thinking he was 
But other things may be said of our two wounded stars—flint and steel— 
whom we left travelling in space. We have seen how a spark was struck off 
which became a temporary star, a nebula or a system, according to cireum- 
stances. We also suggested that flint and steel might become a pair of vari- 
able stars, getting more and more distant from each other. It is possible, 
however, if their original proper motion were small, or if they had much cut 
off them, that they may return again and form a connected pair, and add 
another to the many twin suns already existing. It is suggested that 
probably many of these became connected in this way. It is known that 
some binaries are variable. It is possible that these stars may come into 
