Extracted text
Editorial transcription, lightly normalized from the scan. Line-break hyphenation and unmistakable OCR errors have been repaired; the claims remain those of The Flaming Sword.
Query, Chat, and News Department.
EDITOR FLAMING SWORD:
Since I failed to elicit any evidence for the Cellular or against the Copernican Cosmogony, I had intended to drop the discussion, at least for the present, pending the appearance of your book; but on reading two of your paragraphs in your "Editorial Perspective" in last week's Sword found the temptation to criticise too strong to be successfully resisted.
In the first, the point is sought to be made against the "Copernican planetology," that a planetoid is found "with only one-ten-thousandth the mass of Mars" revolving "in nearly the same orbit and in about the same time," whereas "if the mass, speed, and distance of Mars constitute an equation that is constant," the idea of two bodies of such extremely different mass revolving so nearly alike is held to be absurd. And so it would be if "mass" formed any part of the equation, but it does not. Kepler's third law of planetary motion is: "The square of the time of revolution of each planet, is proportional to the cube of its mean distance from the sun." That the mass should cut no figure will be evident from the consideration that if any planet should be separated into two or more parts, the former equilibrium would still exist for each part the same as for the whole.
Of course, the alleged close conformity of all the planets to Kepler's law would weigh nothing with you, for in your scheme they do not revolve around the sun at all, and all are substantially the same distance from us; namely, from about 1,000 to 8,000 miles while visible. All the point I wish to make is, that you have misstated the law of planetary motions, and if you can cite me to any standard work on Astronomy in which the mass of a planet is treated as a factor in determining its orbit or velocity, I would be pleased to have you do so.
The paragraph relating to the tides must be touched very briefly. That the tides follow the moon, has been observed from time immemorial, and the inference that they are mainly caused by her is as unassailable now as ever. And it may be admitted that the constant presence of an equal tide opposite the moon has been a puzzle to scientists in the past, without in the least weakening the presumption of their lunar origin. Our present day scientists, however, do not consider it a puzzle. They claim it as an incontrovertible proposition that when any body appears to revolve around another, they really both revolve around their common center of gravity. In the case of the earth and moon, that common center is 3,000 miles from the earth's center toward the moon, so that the side of the earth from the moon, measured from that center, is 7,000 miles distant, while the other side is only 1,000 miles distant, and the anti-lunar tide is due to the centrifugal force due to such inequality. The centrifugal force due to the earth's rotation is not meant; that has...
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The source scans remain the record. This page preserves the periodical's claims without presenting its conclusions as independently established results.
Source: The Flaming Sword · Vol. 12, No. 47 · October 7, 1898 · Physical PDF p. 9
The Flaming Sword · Vol. 12, No. 47 · Oct 7, 1898 · PDF p. 9