But it may be urged that the resistance of such attenuated vapors in space, and the generation of electricity in such quantities, would inevitably retard and finally destroy planetary motion. The sufficient answer to this is found in the consideration that the same facts must exist under any possible mode of organization of our solar system, and that such interference, besides, must have absolutely prevented its formation at all, if such were the case. All the matter of our planetary system together is only one seven-hundred-and-fiftieth that of the sun; if this were added to the sun's bulk it would but slightly enlarge it. But all this solar and planetary matter together, if distributed over the space occupied by our planetary system,--and, by the nebular hypothesis of the organization of our solar system, this is requisite,--and having an axial diameter one-half that of its equatorial (see Proctor's "Familiar Essays on Scientific Subjects,"--"Oxygen in the Sun"), would have had a density of only about one four-hundred-thousandth that of hydrogen gas at atmospheric pressure. This nebular mass must have had a diameter at least sixty times that of the distance of the earth from the sun and a depth of thirty times its distance. That this enormous mass of attenuated matter should ever have been made to rotate as a whole by any force of attraction, repulsion, or rotation, with a tenuity so great that, if measured by an equal volume of hydrogen gas,--the lightest substance known to us,--it would have furnished material for four hundred thousand such systems as ours, presupposes a resistance so slight that the planets themselves, when coagulated out of such a mass, could never in any conceivable time exhibit retardation from such a source; and we know to a certainty that such attenuated vapors do exist in space, for electricity cannot be transmitted through a vacuum, and it is transmitted with perfect freedom between the earth and the sun. But it may be said that the laws were then different. If they were different then, they are doubtless different now. If, on the other hand, we assume that the bodies of which our solar system is composed were simply aggregated into concrete masses from meteoric dust, the difficulty is not lessened; for if the resistances to their operation now are such as to perceptibly retard their motions, they must have operated still more powerfully to originally prevent them; while, if hurled forth by an almighty fiat, complete from the hand of creative energy, the same force which impelled them forward must have also established the laws under which they now move.