eccentricity of the orbit, as the context shows. Its effect on the Earth, as he wisely points out, would be to reduce its extremities to extremes. To get out of his quandary he then embraced a brilliant suggestion of a brother geologist, M. Blandet. M. Blandet conceived the idea, and brought it forth unaided, that all that was necessary was a sun big enough to look down on both poles of the Earth at once. To get this he travelled back to the time when, in Laplace's cosmogony, the Sun filled the whole orbit of Mercury. This conception, which, De Lapparent remarks, "might, at the time of its apparition, have disconcerted spirits accustomed to consider our system as stable,"—an apparition which we may add would certainly continue to disconcert them,—he says seems to him quite in harmony with that system's genesis. That it labors under two physical impossibilities, one on the score of the Sun, the other on that of the Earth, and that in this case two negatives do not make an affirmative, need not be repeated here, as the reader will find it set forth at length elsewhere,[1] together with what I conceive to be the only explanation of paleothermal times which will work astronomically—presently to be mentioned. But before I do so, it is pertinent to record two things that have come to my notice since. One is that in rereading Faye's "Origine du Monde," I came upon a passage in which
- ↑ "Mars as the Abode of Life," Macmillan, 1908.
