planet. Nay, indeed, so far from making the Universe less a mystery than
before, it makes it a greater mystery. Creation by manufacture is a much
lower thing than creation by evolution. A man can put together a
machine; but he cannot make a machine develop itself. That our
harmonious universe once existed potentially as formless diffused
matter, and has slowly grown into its present organized state, is a far
more astonishing fact than would have been its formation after the
artificial method vulgarly supposed. Those who hold it legitimate to
argue from phenomena to noumena, may rightly contend that the Nebular
Hypothesis implies a First Cause as much transcending "the mechanical
God of Paley," as this does the fetish of the savage.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 11: _Cosmos._ (Seventh Edition.) Vol. i. pp. 79, 80.]

[Footnote 12: Since the publication of this essay the late Mr. R. A.
Proctor has given various further reasons for the conclusion that the
nebulae belong to our own sidereal system. The opposite conclusion,
contested throughout the foregoing section, has now been tacitly
abandoned.]

[Footnote 13: Any objection made to the extreme tenuity this involves,
is met by the calculation of Newton, who proved that were a spherical
inch of air removed four thousand miles from the Earth, it would expand
into a sphere more than filling the orbit of Saturn.]

[Footnote 14: A reference may fitly be made here to a reason given by
Mons. Babinet for rejection of the Nebular Hypothesis. He has calculated
that taking the existing Sun, with its observed angular velocity, its
substance, if expanded so as to fill the orbit of Neptune, would have
nothing approaching the angular velocity which the time of revolution of
that planet implies. The assumption he makes is inadmissible. He
supposes that all parts of the nebulous spheroid when it filled
Neptune's orbit, had the same angular velocities. But the process of
nebular condensation as indicated above, implies that the remoter
flocculi of nebulous matter, later in reaching the central mass, and
forming its peripheral portions, will acquire, during their longer
journeys towards it, greater velocities. An inspection of one of the
spiral nebulae, as 51st or 99th Messier, at once shows that the outlying
portions when they reach the nucleus, will form an equatorial belt
moving round the common centre more rapidly than the rest. Thus the
central parts will have small angular velocities,