When the sun reached out to earth it must have had a diameter of nearly 200 million miles, but having now contracted to a diameter of less than one million of miles, should it not have a density ten times greater than earth’s, instead of one so much less? For if the solid parts when out at Neptune began to fall toward the sun’s centre, they should have continued to fall until they reached it, or until they had met a density greater than their own. We must remember even at the sun’s present surface a body would fall with much greater velocity than on earth’s surface because of its greater weight. With the density of our earth more than five times that of water, and twice that of solid rock, all heavy substances must gravitate toward its centre; whereas on the surface of the sun the gravitation is more than 27 times stronger. If then the sun were ever a fire-mist reaching out to earth, it would seem that nothing should have prevented the earth from falling with lightning-like speed to the sun’s centre, as its volume was 8,000,000 times larger than now, and even its present volume would hold 900 thousand worlds like ours before it would have a like density. 2d. _Gravitation._ We see the sun to-day as a perfect sphere, but does a body that is a sphere ever throw off rings by rotary movement? When a body in its revolutions throws off rings by rotating, instead of being spherical it is of a flattened, or grind-stone shape, and the rings are hurled from it by the centrifugal force overpowering the gravitation; hence we cannot think that the sun’s rings,—being of enormous circumference and necessarily of a light or fluid substance in order to be thrown off,—could form into spheres unless the centrifugal force was extremely great. Let us suppose that Neptune was thrown off from the sun as a ring, like those we see around Saturn; and, as it is now about 3,000 millions of miles distant from the sun’s centre, before it was detached it must have had a diameter of about 6,000 millions of miles, with a circumference of over 18,000 million miles. Now, as Neptune has about 100 times the volume of earth,[5] its ring could have been no more than 40 miles square; for 1600 square miles multiplied by 18,000 million miles, the distance around that ring, will give more than Neptune’s volume. How then could any substance so exceedingly thin draw to itself this enormous distance of 18,000 millions of miles, any more than a thread a thousand miles in length could draw itself together into a ball, without the thread’s breaking into a million pieces?