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 satellites, not as
turned out like manufactured articles, ready made, at measured
intervals, in a vast and deliberate celestial Orrery, but as due to the
slow and gradual working of natural laws, in accordance with which each
has assumed by force of circumstances its existing place, weight, orbit,
and motion.
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