."[195]

2. _Scientific astronomy inexorably demolishes the Atheistic scheme for
the arrangement of the solar system by accident, commonly known as
Buffon's cosmogony._

"Buffon supposed that the force of a comet falling obliquely on the sun
has projected to a distance a torrent of the matter of which it is
composed, as a stone thrown into a basin causes the water which it
contains to splash out. This torrent of matter, in a state of fusion,
has broken into several parts, which have been arrested at different
distances from the sun, according to their density, or the impetus they
received. They then united in spheres, by the effect of the motion of
rotation, and condensing by cold, have become opaque and solid planets
and satellites."[196]

This formation of worlds by accident, it is true, gave no reason for the
form of their orbits, for their rotation on their axes, in one
direction, and that, too, the direction of their motion, nor for several
other matters, of which Infidels make little account, but about which
plain men like to ask, namely: Where did the sun come from? What melted
it down into a fluid state, fit to be splashed about? Where did the
comet come from? And who threw it with so correct an aim through
infinite space as exactly to hit the sun _in an oblique direction_.
Creation, it seems, was nearly missed, after all. This chaotic theory
never gained much respect from men of science, though its simplicity
speedily opened its way among the vulgar, and it has ever been a
favorite with the most ignorant class of Infidels, numbering thousands
of warm advocates, even at the present day.

It was thought to be very much corroborated by the discovery of the
asteroids, and their supposed formation by the explosion of a larger
body. There is a certain proportion observed in the distances of the
orbits of the planets from each other--a breadth or gauge, as it were,
on the celestial railroad. But there was the breadth of a track between
the orbits of Mars and Jupiter on which no train ran, and this vacancy
excited the curiosity of astronomers. In the first seven years of this
century, three very small planets were discovered, running near this
track; and Dr. Olbers, the discoverer of Pallas, finding that they were
nearly in the same track, and sometimes crossed each other, and that
they were diminutively small--bearing about the same proportion to a
regular planet which a hand-car does to a freight train--imagined