Our interior situation, nevertheless, makes it extremely difficult to determine the real relations in space of the star-streams circling around it. The observed facts are, perhaps, equally compatible with many other structural schemes besides those based on the idea of spirality; and it will be prudent to adopt none, for the present, with settled conviction. We can, however, gather one sufficiently definite piece of information regarding the history of the Cosmos. All the inmates of the heavens, stellar and nebular, represent quite evidently the débris of a primitive rotating spheroid. Its equator is still marked by the galactic annulus, its poles by a double canopy of white nebulæ. The gyrating movement which it once possessed as a whole doubtless survives in its parts, but ages must elapse before the fundamental sidereal drift can be elicited. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 85: Keeler, _Lick Publications_, vol. iii., p. 214.] [Footnote 86: Rosse, _Transactions Royal Dublin Society_, vol. ii., p. 93.] [Footnote 87: First detected as such by Holden and Schaeberle in 1888, _Monthly Notices_, vol. xlviii., p. 388.] [Footnote 88: Deslandres, _Bulletin Astronomique_, February, 1900.] [Footnote 89: _Astronomical Journal_, Nos. 539, 547.] [Footnote 90: Maunder, _Knowledge_, vol. xix., p. 39.] [Footnote 91: Dr. Max Wolf places the point of nebular concentration in R.A. 12h 53m, D. +61° 20´, that assigned to the galactic pole being in R.A. 12h 49m, D. +62°. _Königstuhl Publ._, Bd. I., p. 174.] [Footnote 92: T. J. J. See, 'Repulsive Forces in Nature,' _Popular Astronomy_, No. 100, December, 1902.] [Footnote 93: _The Earth's Beginnings_, pp. 243-247.] [Footnote 94: _Cf._ Moulton, _Astrophysical Journal_, vol. xxii., p. 165.] [Footnote 95: _Monthly Notices_, vol. lx., p. 259.] [Footnote 96: See _Knowledge_, vol. xiv., p. 50.] [Footnote 97: _Harvard Annals_, vol. xxvi., p. 206.] [Footnote 98: _Astronomical Journal_, vol. ii., p. 100, 1852.] [Footnote 99: _Astrophysical Journal_, vol. xii., p. 158.] CHAPTER XIII THE PROCESSION OF SUNS Phenomena are functions of time, and the form of the function has to be determined in each particular case. That is what the historical method comes to, and its use is prevalent and almost compulsory. We can no longer be satisfied with a simple bird's-eye view of the universe; our thoughts are irresistibly driven to grope into its past, and to divine its future. Statical conceptions sufficed for our intellectual forefathers. They aimed at establishing the equilibrium of things, while we see them in a never-ending flux. One aspect of them calls up the next, and that another, and so on _ad infinitum_; we cannot, if we would, balance our ideas on the pivot of the transient present.