A third objection is of a somewhat different character. Laplace was a very great mathematician, and there was nothing the matter with his abstract mathematical theory, so far as it went. More refined modern analysis has confirmed it at every step, and observation does the same, as photographs of rotating nebulae (Plate XVI) bear witness. These photographs exhibit a process taking place before our eyes, which is essentially identical with that imagined by Laplace, except for a colossal difference of scale. Everything happens qualitatively as Laplace imagined, but on a scale incomparably grander than he ever dreamed of. In these photographs the primitive nebula is not a single sun in the making, but contains substance sufficient to form hundreds of millions of suns; the condensations do not form puny planets of the size of our earth, but are themselves suns; they are not eight or so in number, but must be counted in millions. We may ask why the same thing cannot happen on the smaller scale imagined by Laplace—for are not the conclusions of mathematics applicable independently of the size of the body with which we are dealing? The answer has in effect been given already (p. 218). Everything happens on the smaller scale according to plan until we come to the formation of the condensations; here the question of scale proves to be vital. We have seen (p. 196) how the molecules which form the sun have condensed into a star because of their great number; the molecules in a room do not condense into anything at all because they are too few. In the same way, the molecules left behind by the slow shrinkage of a sun (assuming this for the moment to rotate rapidly enough to leave molecules behind) would not condense, because at any instant there would be too few of them available for condensation. They would be shed by driblets, and a driblet of gas does not condense but scatters into space. A mathematical calculation decides the question definitely, and the decision is entirely adverse to the hypothesis of Laplace. Apart from minor details, the process imagined by Laplace explains the birth of suns out of nebulae; it cannot explain the birth of planets out of suns.