[Footnote 3: Quoted by Dr. Hastie in the preface to his translation of Kant's _Cosmogony_, Glasgow, 1900.]
[Footnote 4: _Sur l'Origine du Monde_, 3e éd., p. 136.]
[Footnote 5: This also was pointed out by M. Faye, _loc. cit._, p. 150.]
[Footnote 7: Rutherford, _Radio-activity_, p. 342.]
[Footnote 8: _Philosophical Transactions_, vol. lxxxi., p. 85.]
[Footnote 9: Herschel met Laplace during a visit to Paris in July, 1801, but what passed between them is unrecorded. In the sixth edition, however, of the _Exposition du Système du Monde_, Laplace referred to Herschel's observations of nebulæ as confirmatory of his own genetic scheme.]
Laplace's theory was a perfectly definite conception. In this lay its distinctive merit; in this also its special susceptibility to attack. Here was no question of condensation round nuclei arising at discretion amid the large possibilities of boundless elemental confusion; but of an orderly succession of occurrences, rendered inevitable by the steady operation of mechanical laws, and harmonizing, in their outcome, with the array of ascertained phenomena visible in the planetary system. These accordingly ceased to be regarded as arbitrary or casual; they became linked together in the present, and with the past, as joint products of one grand scheme of development. The mode of origin of the bodies exhibiting them accounted, its inventor claimed to have shown, simply and entirely for them all; and at least the fundamental propositions laid down by him could not be gainsaid.
Clearly, the unanimity of planetary movements is no result of chance; it represents quite obviously a survival of the general swirl of an inchoate mass, occupying primitively the whole recognised sphere of solar influence. Ambiguities set in only when details come to be considered. The engendering nebula devised by Laplace was provided with a vast endowment of heat and a slow movement of rotation; hence cooling, contraction, and acceleration advanced _pari passu_, the last as a consequence of the mechanical law by which the algebraic sum of the areas described by any number of bodies round a given axis, multiplied by their several masses and projected upon a single plane, remains constant to the end of time. In other words, to repeat what has been stated a few pages back, the moment of momentum of a congeries of particles can neither increase nor diminish through the effects of their mutual interactions, however varied and prolonged.