THE WORLD BEYOND OUR SENSES 



3500 degrees hotter than boiling water, and about 

 twice as hot as iron at a white glow, almost all 

 the familiar reactions, alike of nature, the labora- 

 tory , or the furnace, are simply reversed. 



Raised to this point, the moving seas would, of 

 course, be vaporized, and more the very atoms 

 of vapor would be split in twain, and exist as free 

 hydrogen and free oxygen. These two gases, at 

 ordinary temperatures, combine with explosive 

 energy. Burned in the oxy-hydrogen lime-light, 

 they produce almost the intensest heat known 

 outside the arc. A mixture of the two, exploded 

 with an electric spark, detonates with a roar like 

 dynamite. At 3500 degrees centigrade, they are 

 inert ; they cannot be made to combine. 



Water, turned to steam at ordinary atmospheric 

 pressure, occupies about one thousand seven hun- 

 dred times its volume in the liquid state ; and the 

 vapor at 3500 degrees centigrade would have ten 

 times the volume it possesses at the point of con- 

 version i.e., 100 degrees centigrade. Counting 

 that oceans and arctic ice cover the earth to an 

 average depth of between one and two miles, such 

 heat would roll upward a mass of incandescent gas, 

 glowing like the sun, almost, and covering the earth 

 with a blanket thousands of miles thick. 



Swept by such a blast, every trace of the agency 

 of living things would disappear in smoke; every - 



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