shoot out, and all the space about is lighted by
the flaming suns. The pull of gravity becomes more and more intense, and
as the one circles the other, the tide is pulled up, and the mighty ball
of fire, which, for all its existence has been practically motionless as
far as rotation goes, begins to acquire a greater and greater rotational
speed as the tidal drag urges it on. The flames begin to reach higher
and higher, and the tides, now urged from the sun by centrifugal force,
rise into an ever greater crest, and as the swinging suns struggle to
break loose, the flaming gas is pulled up and up, and becomes a mighty
column of fire, a column that reaches out across three--four--a dozen
millions of miles of space and joins the two stars at last, as
stalactites and stalagmites grow together. A flaming tie of matter joins
them, two titanic suns, and a mighty rope of fire binds them, while far
mightier chains of gravity hold them together.

"But now their original velocity reasserts itself, and having spiraled
about each other for who can say how long--a year--a million years
seems more probable--but still only an instant in the life of a
star--they begin to draw apart, and the flaming column is stretched out,
and ever thinner it grows, and the two stars at last separate. But now
the gas will never fall back into the sun. Like some giant flaming cigar
it reaches out into space and it will stay thus, for it has been set in
rotation about the sun at such a speed as is needed to form an orbit.
The giant mass of gas is, however, too cool to continue to develop
energy from matter, for it was only the surface of the sun, and cool. As
it cools still further, there appear in it definite condensations, and
the beginnings of the planets are there. The great filament that
stretched from the sun to sun was cigar-shaped, and so the matter is
more plentiful toward the center, and larger planets develop. Thus
Jupiter and Saturn are far larger than any of the others. The two ends
are tapering, thus Earth is larger than Venus, which is larger than
Mercury, and Uranus and Neptune are both smaller than Saturn, Pluto
being smaller than either.

"Mars and the asteroids are hard to explain. Perhaps it is easier to
understand when we remember that the planets thus formed must
necessarily have been rotating in eccentric orbits when they were first
born, and these planets came too near the sun while gaseous, or nearly
so, and Mars lost much of its