(7) Then he goes on to say that the gyrating movements belonging to
the chaotic mass, would have very little difficulty in transforming a
part of a motion of that kind into a veritable rotation, if this last
were compatible with the law of the internal gravitation; that it is
the nature of that kind of masses to only permit, to the bodies moving
in them, revolutions, elliptic or circular, concentric and of the
same duration; that therefore notable portions of the gyrating matter
could take the form and movements of a flat ring, turning around the
centre with the same angular velocity, exactly as if this nebulous
ring were a solid body; that all the particles which have the proper
velocity in the plane of the gyrations, will arrange themselves under
the influence of gravitation in a flat ring with a veritable rotation
around the centre; that any other parts having velocities too great or
too small, will move in the same plane, describing ellipses concentric
to the ring; that if the ellipses are very elongated the materials
composing them will approach the centre, where they will produce a
progressive condensation, communicating to the central globe formed
there a rotation in the same plane with the primitive gyrations; and
finishes off the whole scheme by specifying the first results to
be: (1) The formation of concentric rings turning in one piece, in
the manner of a solid body, around a centre almost empty (_d'abord
vide_); and (2) A rotation in the same direction, communicated to
the condensation which would be produced, little by little, by means
of matter coming in, partly, from regions affected by the internal
eddyings (_tourbillonnements_).
(8) It is unnecessary to go any farther, and take note of his method
of the formation of planets and satellites from rings, as it is much
the same as what we have seen described by others who have written on
the same subject; only interpreted by him in a way to suit his own
purposes, and in which interpretation he does not do full justice
to Laplace, through not having paid sufficient attention to his
explanation of how planets could be formed out of rings. Except in so
far as to note that all along he has considered that rings were formed,
and even those nearest to the centre condensed into globes, long before
the central condensation had attained any magnitude of importance, or
assumed any distinctive shape, and that afterwards all the disposable
matter of the rings and also all the exterior matter that had not
formed part of what was separated from the original universal chaos,
had fallen in towards the small central mass, and so completed the
formation of the sun last of all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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