greater yet than on its opposite surface. If two great globes attract
each other, each tends to draw the other out into an ellipsoidal
figure; they must be more rigid than steel to resist this -- and even
then they cannot altogether resist. If they are liquid or gaseous they
will yield readily to the force of distortion, the amount of which
will depend upon their distance apart, for the nearer they are the
greater becomes the tidal strain. If they are encrusted without and
liquid or gaseous in the interior, the internal mass will strive to
assume the figure demanded by the tidal force, and will, if it can,
burst the restraining envelope. Now this is virtually the predicament
of the body we call a sun when in the immediate presence of another
body of similarly great mass. Such a body is presumably gaseous
throughout, the component gases being held in a state of rigidity by
the compression produced by the tremendous gravitational force of
their own aggregate mass. At the surface such a body is enveloped in a
shell of relatively cool matter. Now suppose a great attracting body,
such as another sun, to approach near enough for the difference in its
attraction on the two opposite sides of the body and on its center to
become very great; the consequence will be a tidal deformation of the
whole body, and it will lengthen out along the line of the
gravitational pull and draw in at the sides, and if its shell offers
considerable resistance, but not enough to exercise a complete
restraint, it will be violently burst apart, or blown to atoms, and
the internal mass will leap out on the two opposite sides in great
fiery spouts. In the case of a sun further advanced in cooling than
ours the interior might be composed of molten matter while the
exterior crust had become rigid like the shell of an egg; then the
force of the ``tidal explosion'' produced by the appulse of another
sun would be more violent in consequence of the greater resistance
overcome. Such, then, is the mechanism of the first phase in the