1882.] 
Pleading for a Geological Idea . 
143 
increase of rotation, — that is, of heating of the inner solid 
comet, — and such a relative increase of the quantity and 
pressure of its fluid portions, that the comet going to peri- 
helion gets divided or dispersed, or may have its progressive 
motion reversed, or its elliptic orbit made parabolic or hyper- 
bolic. The division of Biela’s comet in 1846 has demon- 
strated that my hypothesis (“ Weltgebaurde,” 1845, edt. 
Bauer), that our earth is the offspring of a larger planet, 
was no absurdity. 
Birth of Moons and Rings . 
I have shown why and how the earth moved in a most 
eccentric orbit, intertwined with the orbits of other planets, 
and threw off Mercury. I have shown how after a time, in 
moving in a less eccentric orbit, it gave birth to our moon. 
After the separation of the moon, when the eccentricity 
of the planet and of its orbit was diminished yet consider- 
ably, it turned off rings. Saturn, the least dense of planets, 
proves that such rings may exist. The turning off of rings 
was a series of catastrophes for the earth and its molecules. 
The leaving of moons and rings is likely to occur in the 
equator of the planet, but it need not be, because the 
equator is not of absolute necessity the plane where centri- 
fugality is greatest. Any inequality of mass of the planet 
to the sides of the equator, or any outside attraction not 
falling with its maximum in the equator, must produce an 
inclination of the plane of motion of the satellite to the 
equator, and therewith a continnous oscillation of the 
respective planes. 
Moon or ring need not revolve in the like sense as the 
planet, because at the time of the catastrophe the inequality 
of mass and density, and state of substances, originally and 
by position of sun and disturbing planets, may have been 
so great between the polar hemispheres that the increased 
centrifugality operated in preference on one hemisphere, 
what resulted in such a height and velocity of descent of 
the overbalancing mass towards the equator, and conse- 
quently in such a pressure and velocity of parting ascent 
(velocity in a polar trajectory) on the other side, that the 
separated mass acquired an orbit with so great an inclina- 
tion to the equator of the progenitor that the motion of the 
globular or annular satellite, itself less dense than the cen- 
tral body, became retrograde — a condition which may become 
reversed after condensation and reduction of inclination, and 
a modification in the relative proportion of masses and 
