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Three theories have been advanced for the origin of the moon

Three theories have been advanced for the origin of the moon According to the oldest suggested by the great German philosopher Kant, and developed by Laplace in his monumental treatise “Mécanique Céleste,” the planets have been thrown off from larger central masses by centrifugal force. Nearly forty years ago Prof. George H. Darwin in a masterful essay on tidal friction furnished mathematical proofs, deemed unrefutable, that the moon had separated from the earth. Recently this established theory has been attacked by Prof. T. J. J. See in a remarkable work on the “Evolution of the Stellar Systems,” in which he propounds the view that centrifugal force was altogether inadequate to bring about the separation and that all, including the moon, have come from the depths of space and have been captured. Still a third hypothesis of unknown origin exists which has been examined and commented upon by Prof. W. H. Pickering in “Popular Astronomy of 1907,” and according to which the moo