Now in the course of some observations upon the spectra of the fixed stars by Dr. Huggins, it occurred to that gentleman to turn his telescope, armed with a spectroscope, upon some of the brighter of the nebulæ, and great was his surprise to find that instead of yielding continuous spectra, as they must have done had their light been made up of that of a multitude of stars, they gave spectra containing only two or three isolated bright lines; such a spectrum could only be produced by some luminous gas or vapour, and of this form of matter we are now justified in declaring, upon the strength of numerous modern observations, these remarkable bodies are composed; and it is a curious and interesting fact that some of the nebulæ styled resolvable, from the fact of their exhibiting points of light like stars, yield these gaseous spectra, whence Dr. Huggins concludes that the brighter points taken for stars are in reality nuclei of greater condensation of the nebular matter: and so the fact of the apparent resolvability of a nebula affords no positive proof of its non-nebulous character.
These observations—which have been fully confirmed by Father Secchi of the Roman College—by destroying the evidence in favour of nebulæ being remote clusters, add another attestation to the probability of the truth of the nebular hypothesis, and we have now the confutation of the luminologist to add to that of the astronomers who, in the person of the illustrious Arago, asserted that the ideas of the great author of the “Mécanique Céleste” “were those only which by their grandeur, their coherence, and their mathematical character could be truly considered as forming a physical cosmogony.”
Confining, then, our attention to the single object of the universe it is our task to treat of—the Moon—and without asserting as an indisputable fact that which we can never hope to know otherwise than by inference and analogy, we may assume that that body once existed in the form of a vast mass of diffused or attenuated matter, and that, by the action of gravitation upon the particles of that matter, it was condensed into a comparatively small and compact planetary body.
But while the process of condensation or compaction was going on, another important law of nature—but recently unfolded to our knowledge—was in powerful operation, the discussion of which law we reserve for a separate Chapter.