; while no account
whatever is given of the origin either of the sun or its atmosphere, and
none of the laws or conditions on which the whole process of development
is confessedly dependent.

But the author of "The Vestiges" takes a much wider range, and attempts
a more arduous task. He seeks to account for the origin both of suns and
of solar systems by the agency of natural laws. Not content with the
more limited form of the theory, which M. Comte holds to be the only
legitimate or practical object of scientific treatment, he holds that
the origin of the sun itself, and the _forms_, the _positions_, the
_relations_, and the _motions_, of all the heavenly bodies, may be
accounted for by supposing a previous state of matter, fluid or
gasiform, subject only to the law of gravitation. The Nebular Cosmogony,
which is well characterized by himself as his "version of _the romance
of Nature_," is based on the assumption that "the nebulous matter of
space, previously to the formation of stellar and planetary bodies, must
have been a universal FIRE-MIST,"[30] in other words, a diffused
luminous vapor, intensely hot, which might be gradually condensed into a
fluid, and then into a solid state, by losing less or more of its heat.
The existence of such a luminous matter being assumed, and it being
further supposed that it was not entirely uniform or homogeneous, but
that it existed in various states of condensation, and that it had
"certain nuclei established in it which might become centres of
aggregation for the neighboring diffused matter,"--the author attempts
to show that on such centres a rotatory motion would be established
wherever, as was the most likely case, there was any obliquity in the
lines of direction in which the opposing currents met each other; that
this motion would increase as the agglomeration proceeded; that at
certain intervals the centrifugal force, acting on the remoter part of
the rotating mass, would overcome the agglomerating force; and that a
series of rings would thus be left apart, each possessing the motion
proper to itself at the crisis of separation. These, again, would only
continue in their annular form, if they were entirely uniform in their
internal structure. There being many chances against this, they would
probably break up in the first instance, and be thereafter "agglomerated
into one or several masses, which would become representatives of the
primary mass, and perhaps give rise to a p