be amply accounted for. At this rate many thousands of years must elapse before the diminution in the sun's diameter would be large enough to be appreciable by our measurements.
Looking back into the remote ages, we thus see that the sun was larger and larger the further back we project our view. If we go sufficiently far back, we seem to come to a time when the sun, in a more or less completely gaseous state, filled up the surrounding space out to the orbit of Mercury, or, earlier still, out to the orbit of the remotest planet. If we admit that the present laws of nature have been acting during the past ages to which we refer, then it does not seem possible to escape the conclusion that the sun was once a nebulous mass of gas such as the nebular theory of Laplace would require.
It will also throw some light upon this retrospective argument for the nebular theory if we briefly consider the probable history of the earth. It is known that the interior of the earth is hotter than the exterior. It has been suggested that this interior heat may arise from certain chemical actions which are at present going on. If this were universally the case, the argument now to be brought forward could not be entertained. I believe, however, most physicists will agree in thinking that the interior heat of the earth is an indication that it is cooling down from some former condition in which it was hotter than it is at present. The surface has cooled already, and the interior is cooling as quickly as the badly conducting materials of the crust will permit. We are thus led to think of the earth as having been hotter in past time than at present. The further we look back the greater must the earth's heat have been. We cannot stop
