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COMETARY MATTER. 653
The occurrence may have been due to several other causes. Since
Astronomers are inclined to think our Planets are tending toward
precipitation into the Sun, why should not that Star have blazed up
owing to a collision of such precipitated Planets, or, as many suggest,
the appulse of a Comet Be that as it may, the only known instance
ot star-transformation since 181 1 is not favourable to the Nebular
Theory. Moreover, on the question of this Theor>-, as on all others,
Astronomers disagree.
Buffon, being
In our own age, and before Laplace ever thought of it,
very much struck by the identity of motion in the Planets, was the
first to propose the hypothesis that the Planets and their satellites
originated in the bo.som of the Sun.
Forthwith and for this purpose,
he invented a special Comet, supposed to have torn out, by a powerful
oblique blow, the quantity of matter necessary for their formation,
Laplace gave its dues to the "Comet" in his Exposition du Systeme du
Monde* But the idea was seized and even improved upon by a conception
of the alternate evolution, from the Sun's central mass, of
Planets apparently without weight or influence on the motion of the
visible Planets—and as evidently without any more existence than the
likeness of Moses in the Moon.
But the modern theory is also a variation on the systems elaborated
by Kant and Laplace. The idea of both was that, at the origin of
things, all that Matter which now enters into the composition of the
planetar>' bodies was spread over all
the space comprized in the Solar
System—and even beyond.
and its condensation gradually gave birth, by a mechanism that has
It was a nebula of extremely small density,
hitherto never been explained, to the various bodies of our System.
This is the original Nebular Theory, an incomplete yet faithful repetition—a
short chapter out of the large volume of universal Esoteric
Cosmogony—of the teachings of the Secret Doctrine. And both
systems, Kant's and Laplace's, differ greatly from the modern Theory,
redundant with conflicting sub-\.\\^ox\&s and fanciful hypotheses. Say
the Teachers:
The essence of cometary matter [and of that which composes the
Stars] . ... is totally different from any of the cheynical or physical
characteristics with which the greatest Chemists and Physicists of the earth
are familiar. . . . While the spectroscope has shown the probable similarity
[owing to the chemical action of terrestrial
• Note vii. Summarized from Wolf, p. 6.
light upon the inter-