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 
assume 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 1 lie 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. AVe 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 orhit 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 afi'ected 
and diminished by the resistance of the medium through which it 
travels. If one hundred miles a second were the initial velocity of 
