202 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



its tendency of motion must have first been in a straight line ; and as 

 the projectile-force would have been greater at its origin than after 

 ages upon ages of retardation, the earth would therefore primarily 

 have had a greater antagonistic force to the attraction of the sun, and 

 the higher the centrifugal force, the greater the expanse of her orbit. 

 The more we twirl a mop the more it spreads, and no amount of Kepler's 

 laws, or anybody else's, would get over the physical fact, or convince 

 people against their eyesight or their senses. Astronomers must 

 make their calculations and predictions upon definite forms, such as 

 circles, ellipses, parabolas, parallelograms, and so forth. They must 

 assime these if they do not exist — and they do not. But there is no 

 astronomical calculation rigidly correct, and the slightest deviation 

 is fatal to the doctrine of the permanence and fixity and unalterability 

 of the celestial mechanism and planetary motions. There is no such 

 fixity. All is change everywhere through boundless space — slow, 

 elaborating, perfecting; altering, changing, destroying — change — 

 like life and death — everywhere without exception. 



To return to the point asserted, that "if the distance of a planet 

 from the sun be increased, the velocity in the orbit will be di- 

 minished." If the velocity of the earth be due to a primary projection, 

 that projection could not have been circular ; there is no such force 

 as circular projection known. We cannot shoot round a corner even 

 with a bent gun. Therefore if the earth's orbital motion be due to 

 any original projectile-force, the primary direction of the earth's 

 course must have been direct ; and this normal course can only have 

 been turned into a circular revolution round the sun by the sun's 

 superior attractive power. If, then, the superiority of the sun's at- 

 tractive power over the earth's direct motion be increased by the 

 diminution of the original projectile-force through ages of slight re- 

 sistance by the ether of space, then the ever-increasing difference of 

 that superiority will ever and ever be reducing the orbit into closer 

 and closer proximity to the central attracting sun. Thus therefore 

 it is evident that if the world acquired its orbital motion, or rather 

 its translation through space, by any explosion, or condensation of ne- 

 bulous matter, or any other source of projectile-force, its orbit must 

 be a constantly increasing or a constantly diminishing spiral. It is 

 quite evident also that if the earth did possess any given and definite 

 initial velocity, that velocity must remain the same, unless affected 

 and diminished by the resistance of the medium through which it 

 travels. If one hundred miles a second were the initial velocity of 



