96 THE BORDERLAND OF SCIENCE. 



Even those who have denied that Jupiter can be the 

 abode of life, and have formed altogether unfavourable 

 ideas of his condition, have pictured him nevertheless 

 as the scene of a continual calm, though the calm is, 

 according to their view, the calm of gloom and deso- 

 lation. They recognise in Jupiter an eternal winter 

 rather than a perpetual spring. Whewell, for example, 

 in that once famous work the Plurality of Worlds, main- 

 tained that if living creatures exist at all in Jupiter, 

 they mVist be wretched gelatinous monsters, languidly 

 floating about in icy seas. According to him Jupiter 

 is but a great globe of ice and water with perhaps a 

 cindery nucleus a glacial planet, with no more vitality 

 in it than an iceberg. 



But when we begin to examine the records of ob- 

 servers, and to consider them with due reference to the 

 vast proportions of the planet, we recognise the fact 

 that whatever may be Jupiter's unfitness to be the 

 abode of life, it is not of an excess of stillness that 

 his inhabitants (if he have any) can justly make com- 

 plaint. Setting aside the enormous activity of which 

 the mere existence of the belts affords evidence, and 

 even regarding such phenomena as the formation or the 

 disappearance of a new belt in two or three hours as 

 merely indicative of heavy rainfalls or of the conden- 

 sation of large masses of invisible aqueous vapour into 

 clouds, there have been signs on more occasions than 

 one, of Jovian hurricanes blowing persistently for 

 several weeks together at a rate compared with which 

 the velocity of our fiercest tornadoes seems utterly 



