Page:A philosophical essay on probabilities Tr. Truscott, Emory 1902.djvu/109

Rh Whatever may be the nature of the cause in question, since it has produced or directed the movement of the planets, it is necessary that it should have embraced all the bodies and considered all the distances which separate them, it can have been only a fluid of an immense extension. Therefore in order to have given them in the same sense an almost circular movement about the sun it is necessary that this fluid should have surrounded this star as an atmosphere. The consideration of the planetary movements leads us then to think that by virtue of an excessive heat the atmosphere of the sun was originally extended beyond the orbits of all the planets, and that it has contracted gradually to its present limits.

In the primitive state where we imagine the sun it resembled the nebulae that the telescope shows us composed of a nucleus more or less brilliant surrounded by a nebula which, condensing at the surface, ought to transform it some day into a star. If one conceives by analogy all the stars formed in this manner, one can imagine their anterior state of nebulosity itself preceded by other stars in which the nebulous matter was more and more diffuse, the nucleus being less and less luminous and dense. Going back, then, as far as possible, one would arrive at a nebulosity so diffuse that one would be able scarcely to suspect its existence.

Such is indeed the first state of the nebulae which Herschel observed with particular care by means of his powerful telescopes, and in which he has followed the progress of condensation, not in a single one, these stages not becoming appreciable to us except after