Page:The evolution of worlds - Lowell.djvu/182

This page has been validated.
150
THE EVOLUTION OF WORLDS

own. That his conception of it was not strictly scientific is evidenced by his not realizing that to bury his enemies was the way to make them take the first step of the journey thither. Indeed, the vindictive venting of his notions clearly indicates their source as volcanic, rather than bred of a general disapproval of a downward descent either in silicates or sin.

It was not till man began to bore into the Earth for metallic or potable purposes that he brought to light the generic fact that it was everywhere hotter as one went down. And this not only in a very regular, but in a most speedy, manner. The temperature increased in a really surprising way 1°F. for every sixty-five feet of descent. As the rise continued unabated to the limit of his borings, becoming very unpleasant at its end, it was clear that at a depth of thirty-five miles even so refractory a substance as platinum must melt, and practically all the Earth except a thin crust be molten or even gaseous.

Now heat, like money, is easy to dissipate but hard to acquire, as primitive man was the first to realize. It does not come without cause. Being a mode of motion, other motion must have preceded it from which it sprang. So much the doctrine of the conservation of energy teaches us, a doctrine considered now to have been the great scientific heirloom of the nineteenth century to the twentieth, yet which in its day caused the