2nd. The little planets called asteroids take somewhat the form of a nebula and are distant from the sun from two to three hundred and fifteen millions of miles. Yet these planets, numbering some three hundred, do not, if taken all together, form more than one-fourth the size of Earth, yet they must be older than either Earth or Mars, according to the above hypothesis, and should likewise be cold. For a time the explosion of some planet was thought to have formed them, but the great number since discovered, and their position and movements, give no credence to the belief that they are fragments of a shattered planet; for Vesta as seen by the naked eye, and Ceres and Pallas, show by their orbits that to be an impossibility. They are now thought to have been thrown from the sun as a ring, and that the ring, instead of forming into one planet, has been broken up into these numberless asteroids. If this supposition be true we should expect to find them all at about the same distance from the sun. Instead we find that their distances vary millions of miles, making nearly as great a difference between them as is their distance from the sun. What, then, must that ring have been when it is claimed that the combined mass of the asteroids would not exceed over 400 miles! Proctor tells us: “The asteroids themselves supply an argument in favor of the nebular theory rendering its probability so strong as practically to amount to certainty; for the antecedent probability against the observed uniformity of direction of the 175 asteroids by chance, or in any conceivable way except as the result of some process of evolution is equal to that of tossing either ‘head’ or ‘tail’ 175 times running, or about 23,945,290,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1.”[9] Notwithstanding the above statement we would argue that when those asteroids were formed the sun must have reached out to them, if they were cast off from it; whereas we see them distant from the sun only from two to three hundred million miles, while Jupiter is 480 millions of miles distant from it, so that to-day the asteroids are about as far from one as the other. How could they thus get away from the sun’s gravitation when it is still a thousand times larger than Jupiter and at the time they were thrown off—or _detached_—must have been much more than that. It is claimed that Jupiter has still great power over these asteroids, and if so the sun should have a much greater power because of its size and proximity. FOOTNOTES: