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146 continue, practically to the exclusion of any diminution at first of the spin, until the body had turned over in its plane so that the spin became direct. As the force increases greatly with nearness to the Sun, the effect would be most marked on the nearer, and most so on the biggest, bodies. This would account for the otherwise strange gradation from retrograde to direct in the tilts of the axes of the outer planets, and also for the present tilts of all the inner ones.

Related to the initial retrograde rotations of the planets, and in a sense survivals from an earlier state of things, are two of the latest discoveries of motions in the solar system, the retrograde orbital movements of the ninth satellite of Saturn and the eighth of Jupiter. Considered so anomalous as scarcely at first to be believed, it has been stated that they directly contradict the theory of Laplace. This is true; in the same sense and no more in which they directly contradict the contradictor, one of the latest theories. For neither theory has anything to explain them as the result of law. That they cannot be the sport of indifferent chance seems evidenced by their occupying similar external positions in their respective systems. As the product of a law we must regard them, and to find that law we now turn. Suppose the planet originally to have been rotating backward, or in the direction of the hands of a clock. At this time the satellite, which may never have