he majority of the stars.--In a word, should Astronomy ever
demonstrate a "nebula," in the sense at present intended, I should
consider the Nebular Cosmogony--_not_, indeed, as corroborated by the
demonstration--but as thereby irretrievably overthrown.

By way, however, of rendering unto Caesar _no more_ than the things that
are Caesar's, let me here remark that the assumption of the hypothesis
which led him to so glorious a result, seems to have been suggested to
Laplace in great measure by a misconception--by the very misconception of
which we have just been speaking--by the generally prevalent
misunderstanding of the character of the nebulae, so mis-named. These he
supposed to be, in reality, what their designation implies. The fact is,
this great man had, very properly, an inferior faith in his own merely
_perceptive_ powers. In respect, therefore, to the actual existence of
nebulae--an existence so confidently maintained by his telescopic
contemporaries--he depended less upon what he saw than upon what he
heard.

It will be seen that the only valid objections to his theory, are those
made to its hypothesis _as_ such--to what suggested it--not to what it
suggests; to its propositions rather than to its results. His most
unwarranted assumption was that of giving the atoms a movement towards a
centre, in the very face of his evident understanding that these atoms,
in unlimited succession, extended throughout the Universal space. I have
already shown that, under such circumstances, there could have occurred
no movement at all; and Laplace, consequently, assumed one on no more
philosophical ground than that something of the kind was necessary for
the establishment of what he intended to establish.

His original idea seems to have been a compound of the true Epicurean
atoms with the false nebulae of his contemporaries; and thus his theory
presents us with the singular anomaly of absolute truth deduced, as a
mathematical result, from a hybrid datum of ancient imagination
intertangled with modern inacumen. Laplace's real strength lay, in fact,
in an almost miraculous mathematical instinct:--on this he relied; and in
no instance did it fail or deceive him:--in the case of the Nebular
Cosmogony, it led him, blindfolded, through a labyrinth of Error, into
one of the most luminous and stupendous temples of Truth.

Let us now fancy, for the moment, that the ring first thrown off by the
Sun--that is to say, the ring whose bre