48 THE SUN. 



and so on : describing, or trying to describe, the horrors 

 of that desolation which would ensue. They are as- 

 sembled and piled on one another in this powerful 

 poem with the hand of a master of the horrible ; and 

 in the end everybody goes mad, fights with everybody 

 else, and dies of starvation. 



(2.) But there would not be time for fighting or star- 

 vation. In three days from the extinction of the sun 

 there would, in all probability, not be a vestige of ani- 

 mal or vegetable life on the globe ; unless it were among 

 deep-sea fishes and the subterranean inhabitants of the 

 great limestone caves. The first forty-eight hours would 

 suffice to precipitate every atom of moisture from the 

 air in deluges of rain and piles of snow, and from that 

 moment would set in a universal frost such as Siberia 

 or the highest peak of the Himalayas never felt a tem- 

 perature of between two and three hundred degrees 

 below the zero of our thermometers. This is no fanciful 

 guess-work. Professor Tyndall has quite recently shown 

 that it is entirely to the moisture existing in the air 

 that our atmosphere owes its power of confining, and 

 cherishing as it were the heat which is always endea- 

 vouring to radiate away from the earth's surface into 

 space. Pure air is perfectly transparent to terrestrial 

 heat so that but for the moisture present in the atmo- 

 sphere, every night would place the earth's surface as it 

 were in contact with that intense cold which we are 

 certain exists in empty space : a degree of cold which 

 from several different and quite independent lines of in- 

 quiry we are sure is not less than 230 degrees of Fah- 



