Moreover there were no known bodies forming a connecting link in these respects between comets and planets or satellites.[154]
From these remarkable coincidences Laplace inferred that the various bodies of the solar system must have had some common origin. The hypothesis which he suggested was that they had condensed out of a body that might be regarded either as the sun with a vast atmosphere filling the space now occupied by the solar system, or as a fluid mass with a more or less condensed central part or nucleus; while at an earlier stage the central condensation might have been almost non-existent.
Observations of Herschel’s (chapter XII., [§§ 259-61]) had recently revealed the existence of many hundreds of bodies known as nebulae, presenting very nearly such appearances as might have been expected from Laplace’s primitive body. The differences in structure which they shewed, some being apparently almost structureless masses of some extremely diffused substance, while others shewed decided signs of central condensation, and others again looked like ordinary stars with a slight atmosphere round them, were also strongly suggestive of successive stages in some process of condensation.
Laplace’s suggestion then was that the solar system had been formed by condensation out of a nebula; and a similar explanation would apply to the fixed stars, with the planets (if any) which surrounded them.
He then sketched, in a somewhat imaginative way, the process whereby a nebula, if once endowed with a rotatory motion, might, as it condensed, throw off a series of rings, and each of these might in turn condense into a planet with or without satellites; and gave on this hypothesis plausible reasons for many of the peculiarities of the solar system.
So little is, however, known of the behaviour of a body like Laplace’s nebula when condensing and rotating that it is hardly worth while to consider the details of the scheme.
That Laplace himself, who has never been accused of underrating the importance of his own discoveries, did not take the details of his hypothesis nearly as seriously as many of its expounders, may be inferred both from the fact that he only published it in a popular book, and from his remarkable description of it as “these conjectures on the formation of the stars and of the solar system, conjectures which I present with all the distrust (défiance) which everything which is not a result of observation or of calculation ought to inspire.”[155]
[CHAPTER XII.]
HERSCHEL.
“Coelorum perrupit claustra.”