Coming back to the period when we reduced the residuary nebula to the density of our atmosphere with temperature of 0°, or freezing water, we can with confidence affirm that none of the rings abandoned by it for the formation of planets, could have carried with them any contingent of heat to help them in their formation--any beyond the temperature of space--for even if they did it would very soon be reduced to that. Each one of them in condensing, breaking up, rejoining the broken fragments, converting itself into a minor nebula, and finally constituting itself as a planet, must have accumulated in the process its own heat requisite to convert it into a molten liquid globe--a stage of existence through which they are all, that is, the major planets, acknowledged to have passed, or have to pass. During that process its primitive annular form, and the multitude of fragments into which each one of them broke up, would present sufficient radiating surface, not only to dispose of all the heat it could have brought with it from the nebula, but a considerable part of the little it could create for itself while contracting and condensing. We may even go farther and assert that no one of them would have any necessity for being supplied with extraneous heat until it had, in a great measure, exhausted the stock it had produced for itself, or so far as to cool down from the molten liquid to the solid state, and to the stage when vegetable and animal life could exist upon its surface. We have no reason for supposing that an enormous supply of extraneous heat was crammed into each nebula, merely to be radiated into space before condensation could take place, and thus retard the execution of the work in hand. If there are astronomers or physicists who believe that the sun could not acquire by gravitation, all the heat he must have expended during geological time, they must look for it in some other source than that of useless and impossible cramming.
Hitherto we have said nothing of heat being radiated into space by the nebula during our operations, because there could be almost absolutely none to radiate from it at 0° of temperature. No doubt there is a large range between this and the absolute zero of temperature which is -274°; but we have seen, at page 99, that when the nebula was condensed from 403,000,000 to 274 times less dense than air, only _one degree_ was added to its temperature--that is, it was raised from -274° to -273°--and that these -273° of absolute temperature were added to it in its condensation from being only 274 times less dense than air to atmospheric pressure, when its temperature became 0° of the ordinary Centigrade scale. Therefore the only period when there could be any measurable radiation of heat into space would be between the times when the diameter of the nebula was (see Table III.) between 58,000,000 miles and 9,000,000 miles. Even when the end of this period came, the temperature, after a contraction of 49,000,000 miles in diameter, would be only -1° raised to 0°--in other words -273° raised to 0°--and that would not furnish much positive heat--heat such as we are accustomed to deal with--to be radiated into space, whose temperature is without doubt somewhat warmer, so to speak, than -273°. And let us repeat, and fix it in our memory, that this -273° was equal to only 1° of positive heat.