We have already said that the temperature of the globe increases about one degree for every sixty or seventy feet of depth beneath its surface. The correctness of this observation has been verified in a great number of instances--indeed, to the greatest depth to which man has penetrated, and been able to make use of the thermometer. Now, as we know exactly the length of the radius of the terrestrial sphere, it has been calculated from this progression of temperature, supposing it to be regular and uniform, that the centre of the globe ought to have at the present time a mean temperature of 195,000° Centigrade. No matter could preserve its solid state at this excessive temperature; it follows, then, that the centre of the globe, and all parts near the centre, must be in a permanent state of fluidity. The works of Werner, of Hutton, of Leopold von Buch, of Humboldt, of Cordier, W. Hopkins, Buckland, and some other English philosophers, have reduced this hypothesis to a theory, on which has been based, to a considerable extent, the whole science of modern geology; although, properly speaking, and in the popular acceptation of the term, that science only deals with the solid crust of the earth. The nebular theory thus embraces the whole solar system, and, by analogy, the universe. It assumes that the SUN was originally a mass of incandescent matter, that vast body being brought into a state of evolution by the action of laws to which the Creator, in His divine wisdom, has subjected all matter. In consequence of its immense expansion and attenuation, the exterior zone of vapour, expanding beyond the sphere of attraction, is supposed to have been thrown off by centrifugal force. This zone of vapour, which may be supposed at one time to have resembled the rings of Saturn, would in time break up into several masses, and these masses coalescing into globes, would (by the greater power of attraction which they would assume as consolidated bodies) revolve round the sun, and, from mechanical considerations, would also revolve with a rotary motion on their own axes. This doctrine is applied to all the planets, and assumes each to have been in a state of incandescent vapour, with a central incandescent nucleus. As the cooling went on, each of these bodies may be supposed to have thrown off similar masses of vapour, which, by the operation of the same laws, would assume the rotary state, and, as satellites, revolve round the parent planet. Such, in brief, was the grand conception of Laplace; and surely it detracts nothing from our notions of the omnipotence of the Creator that it initiates the creation step by step, and under the laws to which matter is subjected, rather than by the direct fiat of the Almighty. The hypothesis assumes that as the vaporous mass cooled by the radiation of heat into space, the particles of matter would approximate and solidify.