The smaller orbits are so small
that, however turned about, they lie wholly inside the larger and can
not be made to intersect them. If, however, we admit a _series_ of
explosions, this difficulty is removed; and if we grant an explosion at
all, there seems to be nothing improbable in the hypothesis that the
fragments formed by the bursting of the parent mass would carry away
within themselves the same forces and reactions which caused the
original bursting, so that they themselves would be likely enough to
explode at some time in their later history."[8]
[Footnote 8: General Astronomy, by Charles A. Young. Revised edition,
1898, p. 372.]
The rival theory of the origin of the asteroids is that which assumes
that the planetary ring originally left off from the contracting solar
nebula between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter was so violently perturbed
by the attraction of the latter planet that, instead of being shaped
into a single globe, it was broken up into many fragments. Either
hypothesis presents an attractive picture; but that which presupposes
the bursting asunder of a large planet, which might at least have borne
the germs of life, and the subsequent shattering of its parts into
smaller fragments, like the secondary explosions of the pieces of a
pyrotechnic bomb, certainly is by far the more impressive in its appeal
to the imagination, and would seem to offer excellent material for some
of the extra-terrestrial romances now so popular.
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