Here we have recognised, the principle that in a star system the immensely greater number of stars at the outside of the scheme would produce a perfect balance of force, and that a body placed at the centre would remain in absolute rest. This agrees wonderfully well with what we have been arguing, a few pages back, with respect to a sun solid to the centre. Matter at the centre would be at absolute rest, _dead_, that nearest to it would be nearest to dead, and so on through a sun or planet, gradually coming to life as it came nearer to the surface; exactly as we have shown it would be, having in it little more than rotary motion. When once acknowledging the immense superiority of attractive force of the stars at the outskirts of the system, over the very few there could be at its centre, Mr. Proctor seems to have stopped short with the idea and to have contented himself with one body at the centre in absolute rest. Had he gone one step further he must have seen that one, or even a very few, could not maintain themselves near the centre with such an immense number pulling them away in every direction. There could be no perfect balance of force. And had he applied the same idea to the earth, and followed it out to the end, he could not have written as he has done, in "The Poetry of Astronomy," at page 354, "that the frame of the earth is demonstrably not the hollow shell formerly imagined, but even denser at its core than near the surface." He would have found some difficulty in fixing his first dead particle at the centre, when there were such infinite hosts of near and far-off neighbours endeavouring to annex it. He would have found that the absolute rest was neither more nor less than absolute vacuum. It is utterly impossible to show how any body could be built up out of a nebula of cosmic matter, or even meteorites, from a solid centre, under the law of attraction. We repeat that any foundation laid there would be in a state of unstable equilibrium, and would be hauled away out of its place never to return; unless the cosmic matter around it were so perfectly arranged on all sides that its attraction on the foundation would be absolutely equal in all directions; a condition which cannot be imagined by any one who takes the trouble to think of it. And we think we may add, that no body could be established at the centre of a system of any kind unless it were of sufficient magnitude to control the whole matter within range of it, exactly as we see in the solar system; and that the central body could be no other than a hollow sphere. Thus we have either to look upon the sun with his planets and their satellites as hollow bodies or to conclude that the solar system was not formed out of a nebula.