214 TH^ POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



more difficult to evaporate continued their downward course. Final- 

 ly, all would again be reduced to a state of vapor. 



What, then, had been accomplished by all this turmoil and activ- 

 ity? Merely this : a large quantity of heat had been conveyed from 

 the interior of the system to the exterior ; for this it is which all cy- 

 clones accomplish. This it is which lends them their power. On our 

 earth it is the sun's heat mainly which the cyclone carries away to the 

 limits of the atmosphere. In the sun itself it is a portion of the jirime- 

 val stock of heat which is i*emoved. 



The cyclone may therefore be defined as the universal cooler of 

 creation. There is not a sun which lights the midnight sky, or which 

 the telescope has brought within mortal ken, which is not vastly in- 

 debted to the cyclone. Though so simple as easily to be understood 

 by a child, it is a powerful means by which the Almighty -works. It 

 is a key to very many of the secrets of the universe. When we watch 

 the snow-storm and the rain, we are really watching the method by 

 which God has proceeded in forming his worlds since ever the cooling 

 process began. Thus have the storms raged and the winds howled 

 throughout the universe for countless ages ; and by that rain, and 

 snow, and hail, has all the solid and liquid substance of the worlds 

 been formed. Every particle of it has been rained and snowed again 

 and again. Nor is the process yet completed. The cyclone has by 

 no means done its work yet. Its task will be finished only when tlie 

 last particle of gas is converted into a liquid or solid. It is going on 

 all around us. If there appears to be a balance at present upon the 

 earth, if the solidifying power of the cyclone appears to be at a stand- 

 still, it is only because its efibrts are counteracted by the extraneous 

 heat we receive from the sun. 



The cyclone may^ also have assisted at the birth of the planets. 

 Those stupendous meteors of thousands of millions of miles of eleva- 

 tion must necessarily have caused immense gaseous masses to bulge 

 out from the general level of the surface of the incipient solar system. 

 This might be sufficient under exceptional conditions, and when the 

 balance between the centrifugal and the centripetal forces was nearly 

 equal, to turn it in favor of the former, and thus generate a planet. 







A CUEIOUS QUESTION OF HOESES' KIBS. 



Br MAX MtJLLER. 



SYLVIUS said that man had formerly an intermaxillary bone. If 

 he has it no longer, he ought to have it. In this he was right. 

 The same Sylvius, in his answer to Vesalius, said that Galen was not 

 wrong when he described man as having seven bones in his sternum, 



