Volume 1

A picture book of evolution / by Dennis Hird.

  • Dennis Hird
Date:
1906-1907
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A picture book of evolution / by Dennis Hird. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    formed in the interior of this same nebula, till at last it would come to the earth, of which the birth goes back to the epoch when the sun had arrived at the present position of the earth’s orbit ”— (Flammarion, p. 73). Venus and Mercury would, according to this theory, be born later. Flammarion says : “ The relative density of the planets strengthens this theory. The moon, formed from matter, floating, so to say, on the terrestrial nebula, is very much lighter than the earth. The superior planets, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter, are much Fig. 33.—-Flammarion’s representation of the way in which the Earth may have been cast off from the Sun as a ring-. less dense than the inferior planets, Mars, the Earth, Venus, and Mercury. Besides, we find in the chemical composition of the different worlds, and even in that of comets, of shooting stars, and of meteoric stones, the same materials which compose the earth, and which exist also in the gaseous state of the sun ”—(p. 74). If the earth was formed by the slow condensation of a gaseous ring detached from the contracting sun, it may have taken place as represented in Fig. 33. You see a large body with a bulging equator, like
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