One point to be particularly noticed in these latter-day congruities is that they are not simply general concords like the older ones—the fact that the planets move in one plane or in the same sense in that plane—but detailed placings, ordered according to the distances of the planets from the Sun or of the satellites from the planets. They are thus not simply of the combinative but of the permutative order of probabilities, a much higher one; in other words, the chance that they can be due to chance is multiplicately small. Thus just as these analogies are by so much more remarkable, so are they by so much more cogent. They tell us not only of an evolution, but they speak of the very manner of its work. They do not simply generalize, they specify the mode of action. The difficulty is to understand their language. It is a case of celestial hieroglyphics to which we lack the key. In attempting now to discover how all this came about we notice first that the system could not have originated in the beautifully simple way suggested by Laplace, because of several impossibilities in the path. If rings were shed, as he supposed, from a symmetric contracting mass, they should have resulted in something even more symmetric than we observe to-day. In the next place they could not, it would appear, even if formed, have collected into planets. Nor could there have been an original “fire-mist” with which as a stock in trade Laplace thriftily endowed his nebula to start with—the necessity for which has been likened to our supposed descent from monkeys; but which in truth is as misty a conception of the facts in the one case as it is a monkeying with them in the other. Darwin’s theory distinctly avers that we were _not_ descended from monkeys; and Laplace’s fire-mist under modern examination evaporates away. It is an interesting outcome of modern analysis that the very fact which suggested the annular genesis of planets to Laplace, the rings of Saturn, should now probably be deemed a striking instance of the reverse. Far from its being an exemplar in the heavens of the pristine state of the solar system, we may now see in it a shining pattern of how the devolution of bodies comes about. For instead of typifying an unfortunate set of particles which untoward circumstance has prevented from coalescing into a single orb, it almost certainly represents the distraught state to which a once more compact congeries of them has been brought by planetary interference. For to just such fate must the stresses in it caused by Saturn have eventually led. Disruption inevitable to such a group the observation of comets demonstrates is daily taking place. When a comet passes round the Sun or near a planet, the partitive pulls of the body tend to dismember it, and the same is _a fortiori_ true of matter circulating round a planet as relatively near as the meteoric particles that constitute Saturn’s rings. Starting