of years, doubtless, before the outlying masses had even got within hailing distance. When masses of people assemble at a camp-meeting, the first comers take the best places, and the late arrivals have to circulate around in the woods; they do not all gather in a circle and then make a grand rush. That would be fair, perhaps, but it is not nature. And this, unquestionably, is how, if ever formed at all, these nebulæ must have formed into systems. The fact that the orbital planes of very many of these asteroids are greatly inclined to the common planetary plane, and still more greatly inclined to one another, points almost unerringly to the existence during their stage of formation of some powerful force either of internal repulsion or external attraction. That no sufficiently large body could have been present to exercise such attraction so far outside the general planetary plane is self-evident, and if there had been such source of attraction, while the orbital planes of the asteroids might have been deflected from the common plane, they could not have been forced apart so as to differ largely among themselves. Certainly nothing pertaining to the nebular hypothesis could have produced any such effects under any conceivable circumstances, and especially at so late a period of its progress, after all the principal planets had been completed. The only alternative is self-repulsion, and this could only have been due to the causes and their mode of operation already described in this work. In a modified degree these planes exhibit the same irregular orbital deflections as are so conspicuously visible in the orbits of comets, and they must have been unquestionably produced in the same manner. The barren bands or stripes in the area occupied by these asteroids, like the dark or vacant rings of the planet Saturn, may have been largely affected by the perturbing attraction of the neighboring planet Jupiter; but certainly no influence of that great planet (himself in the common planetary plane) could have operated to cast these forming planetoids into planes of diverse inclinations among themselves or to that of his own. On the contrary, his whole force must have been exerted to bring them into the closest harmony with his own orbital movements.