But there is still something to be said with respect to the Binary Stars of Table VIII., and any others whose masses may be met with later on. If those forming a pair revolve around each other, or a common centre, in orbits, it must happen that they will be sometimes more or less in conjunction, opposition, and quadrature with regard to the sun; also the angles of the planes of their orbits to direct lines between them and the sun, whatever these angles may be, will cause variations in the separate and combined forces of attraction they exercise in the domains of the sun, at different periods of their revolutions; so that these powers of attraction will be constantly increasing and diminishing, and causing the boundaries of their domains to approach and recede from the sun; thus introducing between their domains and those of the sun a debatable land, which will reduce celestial to be very much like terrestrial affairs, where each proprietor, or power, takes the pull when an opportunity presents itself. No doubt all such invasions, or claims, between proprietors will be settled by the law of attraction, without lawsuit, arbitration or conflict; but as law gives right, and might is right--most emphatically in this case--we come back to the old seesaw of earthly matters. Well, therefore, many astronomers teach that the whole universe is formed out of the same kind of materials, and governed by the same laws that we are having good reason to know something about on this earth of ours. Accustomed to look upon [Greek: a] Centauri as the star nearest to us, on account of its light-distance being so much smaller than any other noted in our text-books, we were not prepared to find that, when measured by his sphere-of-attraction distance, Sirius is actually a rather nearer neighbour to the sun than it; nor that his, apparently, next nearest neighbour, when measured in the same way, is twice as far away as either of them; and thus we have the conviction thrust upon us that they must have made deep hollows in the solar nebula when it was being formed. On the other hand, when we think of three of the other stars mentioned in the list of six, being practically from three to six times farther off than either of them, we come to the conclusion that the form of the nebula, when in its most primitive state, must have been of a very jagged character; a conclusion which is very considerably strengthened when we look at Table VII., and see that the stars noted in it run up to from twice to not far from thirty times more distant from the sun than [Greek: a] Centauri. And now, having got a somewhat definite idea of the form of the sun's domains, we may attempt the construction in them, first of a nebula and afterwards of a solar system, such as our text-books describe to us; introducing into the construction, as a matter of course, the variations from existing theories which, we believe, we have demonstrated to be necessary.