"The members of the Gun Club ought, therefore, at once to commence the labour necessitated by such an enterprise, and be ready to put them into execution at the moment fixed upon, for they will not find the moon in the same conditions of perigee and zenith till eighteen years and eleven days later.
"The staff of the Observatory of Cambridge puts itself entirely at their disposition for questions of theoretic astronomy, and begs to join its congratulations to those of the whole of America.
"_Director of the Observatory of Cambridge_."
A spectator endowed with infinite power of sight, and placed at the unknown centre round which gravitates the universe, would have seen myriads of atoms filling all space during the chaotic epoch of creation. But by degrees, as centuries went on, a change took place; a law of gravitation manifested itself which the wandering atoms obeyed; these atoms, combined chemically according to their affinities, formed themselves into molecules, and made those nebulous masses with which the depths of the heavens are strewed.
These masses were immediately animated by a movement of rotation round their central point. This centre, made of vague molecules, began to turn on itself whilst progressively condensing; then, following the immutable laws of mechanics, in proportion as its volume became diminished by condensation its movement of rotation was accelerated, and these two effects persisting, there resulted a principal planet, the centre of the nebulous mass.
By watching attentively the spectator would then have seen other molecules in the mass behave like the central planet, and condense in the same manner by a movement of progressively-accelerated rotation, and gravitate round it under the form of innumerable stars. The nebulae, of which astronomers count nearly 5,000 at present, were formed.
Amongst these 5,000 nebulae there is one that men have called the Milky Way, and which contains eighteen millions of stars, each of which has become the centre of a solar world.
If the spectator had then specially examined amongst these eighteen millions of stars one of the most modest and least brilliant, a star of the fourth order, the one that proudly named itself the sun, all the phenomena to which the formation of the universe is due would have successively taken place under his eyes.