GUIDE TO THE PLANETS SIR,—Sir Edmund Whittaker will, I am
sure,. forgive me for pointing out two very minor slips in his very friendly review of my book, Guide to the Planets (March 11).
Sir Edmund criticises my statement that the Church adopted Archbishop Ussher's date for the Creation (4004 BC). This date was, as he states, printed in many editions of the Bible, and this would obviously not have been the case had not the ecclesiastical authorities been in agreement, Moreover, reference to any major theological work of that period will show that the statement was, in fact, a semi- official one. Sir Edmund also states that 1 base planetary evolution on the law of angular momentum. This is not correct; the angular momentum difficulty (which is, of course, valid) is only one of many fatal objections to all tidal theories.—Yours faithfully,
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