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 nebulæ 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.

The grand conception of a gradual becoming, instead of a sudden making,
which Kant and Laplace thus applied to the component bodies of the
universe at large, was further applied by Lyell and his school to the
outer crust of this one particular petty planet of ours. While the
astronomers went in for the evolution of suns, stars, and worlds, Lyell
and his geological brethren went in for the evolution of the earth's
surface. As theirs was stellar, so his was mundane. If the world began
by being a red-hot mass of planetary matter in a high state of internal
excitement, boiling and dancing with the heat of its emotions, it