"KANT'S Sämmtliche Werke, Bd. i. p. 207.] "Give me matter," says Kant, "and I will build the world;" and he proceeds to deduce from the simple data from which he starts, a doctrine in all essential respects similar to the well-known "Nebular Hypothesis" of Laplace.

You can demonstrate this for yourself by attempting to explain to someone an intricate conception such as the nebular hypothesis.

cosmic, cosmical^; mundane, terrestrial, terrestrious^, terraqueous^, terrene, terreous^, telluric, earthly, geotic^, under the sun; sublunary^, subastral^. solar, heliacal^; lunar; celestial, heavenly, sphery^; starry, stellar; sidereal, sideral^; astral; nebular; uranic.

Adj. dim, dull, lackluster, dingy, darkish, shorn of its beams, dark 421. faint, shadowed forth; glassy; cloudy; misty &c (opaque) 426; blear; muggy^, fuliginous^; nebulous, nebular; obnubilated^, overcast, crepuscular, muddy, lurid, leaden, dun, dirty; looming &c v.. pale &c (colorless) 429; confused &c (invisible) 447.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Laplace worked out the mechanics of the universe, on the nebular hypothesis.

Like Comte’s, it was based on science, and attempts to show how, starting with a nebular universe, the whole knowable world, psychical and social as well as physical, can be deduced.

May not one discover in this old cosmogonic myth a dim hint of the nebular hypothesis of creation, as it is called?

We are disposed to rank the derivative hypothesis in its fulness with the nebular hypothesis, and to regard both as allowable, as not unlikely to prove tenable in spite of some strong objections, but as not therefore demonstrably true.

The nebular hypothesisa natural consequence of the theory of gravitation and of the subsequent progress of physical and astronomical discoveryhas been denounced as atheistical even down to our own day.

Perhaps, confident, as he evidently is, that his view will finally be adopted, he may enjoy a sort of satisfaction in hearing it denounced as sheer atheism by the inconsiderate, and afterwards, when it takes its place with the nebular hypothesis and the like, see this judgment reversed, as we suppose it would be in such event.

Not Mr. Agassiz, certainly, who adopts a remarkable illustration of design directly founded on the nebular hypothesis, drawing from the position and times of revolution of the worlds so originated "direct evidence that the physical world has been ordained in conformity with laws which obtain also among living beings."

She rarely communicated her opinions among her own sex; but now and then, in strictly masculine and superior society, she had been heard to express herself freely upon the nebular hypothesis and the doctrine of evolution.

[Sidenote: The Nebular Hypothesis taken alone Involves Absurdity.] Nor are the reasons of this tendency far to seek.

It is vain to remind us how later Christianity has patronised nebular hypotheses and the doctrine of evolution.

We incline to accept the nebular hypothesis, for similar reasons; not because it is proved,thus far it is wholly incapable of proof,but because it is a natural theoretical deduction from accepted physical laws, is thoroughly congruous with the facts, and because its assumption serves to connect and harmonize these into one probable and consistent whole.

Clouds robed in sunshine, hanging in fleecy or nebular masses abovea bright, pure illimitable plain of waterblue mountains, or dim islands in the distancea shore of green foliage on the one handa waste of waters on the other.

But if the student of nature and the student of divinity can once agree that all the forces of the universe, as well as all its power, are immediately dependent upon its Creator,that He is not only omnipotent but omnimovent,we have no longer any fear of nebular theories, or doctrines of equivocal generation, or of progressive development....

And here is this crazy nephew of mine proposing the addition to the family of a stranger who hasn't any past and whose future seems wrapped mostly in a nebular hypothesis.

He then set forth the nebular hypothesis that at some long past time our sun and all his planets existed but as a volume of gas, which in contracting and cooling formed a hot volume of rotating liquid, and that as this further contracted and cooled, the planets, and moons, and planetary rings fell off from it and gradually solidified, the sun being left as the solitary comparatively uncooled portion of the original nebula.

In order to change the conditions, it suffices to admit that the ethereal mass revolves in space around the sun with a velocity which is in each place that of the planets there; and this is very reasonable if, admitting the nebular hypothesis, we draw the deduction that the cause that has communicated the velocity to the successive rings has communicated it to the ethereal mass.

NEBULÆ, name given to masses larger or smaller of misty light in the heavens caused by a group of stars too remote to be severally visible to the naked eye. NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS, the theory that the sun and planets with their satellites in the solar system were originally one mass of nebulous matter which, gradually cooling and contracting, under violent revolution resolved itself into separate revolving orbs.

The old nebular hypothesis is discredited and the theory of the spiral movement of the solar matter seems to be confirmed by phenomena observable in the heavens.