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Kant made the germ of the future sun to consist in an aggregation of atoms at the core of the nebula, which, growing by successive innumerable accessions, provided the motive power for the machinery of planetary construction. For it was, as we have seen, the jostling of the particles drawn towards the gradually preponderating centre of attraction which set on foot, it was supposed, the whirl eventually transformed into the tangential velocities of the sun's attendant bodies. They were formed, like the sun, by the perpetuation and increase of subordinate nuclei sure to arise in the elemental tumult. They were formed, not under the guidance of a definite law, but just where chance—or what seemed like chance—favoured an accretion.

The progressive increase of planetary distances noted by Titius and Bode could never have arisen in the Kantian system. Nor could the Kantian planets have had a direct rotation.ssss1 Under the given conditions retrograde systems should have originated. This would have necessarily ensued from the incoherence of their materials. Particles revolving independently one of the other have smaller velocities the more remote they are from the focus of movement. Should they agglomerate into a globe, the inner flights must, as being the swiftest, determine the direction of its rotation, which will consequently reverse the direction of its orbital revolution. Hence, it depends upon the nature of their generating stuff no less than upon the advance of central condensation whether planets, in their domestic arrangements, contravene or obey the larger law of circulation prevailing in the system to which they belong, and Kant's nebula was undoubtedly such as to involve its contravention.