outermost planet--that is to say, so far as our present knowledge goes,
the planet Neptune. Of course, when it was expanded to that immense
distance, it must have been very thin indeed, thinner than our clumsy
human senses can even conceive of. An American would say, too thin; but
I put Americans out of court at once as mere irreverent scoffers. From
the orbit of Neptune, or something outside it, the faint and cloud-like
mass which bore within it Cæsar and his fortunes, not to mention the
remainder of the earth and the solar system, began slowly to converge
and gather itself in, growing denser and denser but smaller and smaller
as it gradually neared its existing dimensions. How long a time it took
to do it is for our present purpose relatively unimportant: the cruel
physicists will only let us have a beggarly hundred million years or so
for the process, while the grasping and extravagant evolutionary
geologists beg with tears for at least double or even ten times that
limited period. But at any rate it has taken a good long while, and, as
far as most of us are personally concerned, the difference of one or two
hundred millions, if it comes to that, is not really at all an
appreciable one.

As it condensed and lessened towards its central core, revolving rapidly
on its great axis, the solar mist left behind at irregular intervals
concentric rings or belts of cloud-like matter, cast off from its
equator; which belts, once more undergoing a similar evolution on their
own account, have hardened round their private centres of gravity into
Jupiter or Saturn, the Earth or Venus. 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