Page:The evolution of worlds - Lowell.djvu/170

138 In attempting now to discover how all this came about we notice first that the system could not have originated in the beautifully simple way suggested by Laplace, because of several impossibilities in the path. If rings were shed, as he supposed, from a symmetric contracting mass, they should have resulted in something even more symmetric than we observe to-day. In the next place they could not, it would appear, even if formed, have collected into planets.

Nor could there have been an original "fire-mist" with which as a stock in trade Laplace thriftily endowed his nebula to start with—the necessity for which has been likened to our supposed descent from monkeys; but which in truth is as misty a conception of the facts in the one case as it is a monkeying with them in the other. Darwin's theory distinctly avers that we were not descended from monkeys; and Laplace's fire-mist under modern examination evaporates away. It is an interesting outcome of modern analysis that the very fact which suggested the annular genesis of planets to Laplace, the rings of Saturn, should now probably be deemed a striking instance of the reverse. Far from its being an exemplar in the heavens of the pristine state of the solar system, we may now see in it a shining pattern of how the devolution of bodies comes about. For instead of typifying an unfortunate set of particles which untoward circumstance has prevented from coalescing