slowly to converge
and gather itself in, growing denser and denser but smaller and smaller
as it gradually neared its existing dimensions. How long a time it took
to do it is for our present purpose relatively unimportant: the cruel
physicists will only let us have a beggarly hundred million years or so
for the process, while the grasping and extravagant evolutionary
geologists beg with tears for at least double or even ten times that
limited period. But at any rate it has taken a good long while, and, as
far as most of us are personally concerned, the difference of one or two
hundred millions, if it comes to that, is not really at all an
appreciable one.

As it condensed and lessened towards its central core, revolving rapidly
on its great axis, the solar mist left behind at irregular intervals
concentric rings or belts of cloud-like matter, cast off from its
equator; which belts, once more undergoing a similar evolution on their
own account, have hardened round their private centres of gravity into
Jupiter or Saturn, the Earth or Venus. Round these again, minor belts or
rings have sometimes formed, as in Saturn's girdle of petty satellites;
or subsidiary planets, thrown out into space, have circled round their
own primaries, as the moon does around this sublunary world of ours.
Meanwhile, the main central mass of all, retreating ever inward as it
dropped behind it these occasional little reminders of its temporary
stoppages, formed at last the sun itself, the main luminary of our
entire system. Now, I won't deny that this primitive Kantian and
Laplacian evolutionism, this nebular theory of such exquisite
concinnity, here reduced to its simplest terms and most elementary
dimensions, has received many hard knocks from later astronomers, and
has been a good deal bowled over, both on mathematical and astronomical
grounds, by recent investigators of nebulae and meteors. Observations on
comets and on the sun's surface have lately shown that it contains in
all likelihood a very considerable fanciful admixture. It isn't more
than half true; and even the half now totters in places. Still, as a
vehicle of popular exposition the crude nebular hypothesis in its rawest
form serves a great deal better than the truth, so far as yet known, on
the good old Greek principle of the half being often more than the
whole. The great point which it impresses on the mind is the cardinal
idea of the sun and planets, with their attendant satelli