Temperature of the Terrestrial Globe. 17 
temperature, in the latitude of Paris, =11°.7 C., and we shall not 
err much if we admit it for the whole ocean to be 12 degrees. Thus, 
in supposing that all the cold water which goes from the poles tow- 
ards the equator may be equal to all the rest of the mass of the 
ocean, the temperature of the bottom should be at +7°C. But 
this portion of the polar water is not perhaps ;,/,; of the rest of the 
ocean. Soundings that have been made along the whole coast of the 
North Sea which borders Siberia indicate only a very small depth. 
This water must, in order to get to the equator, proceed the distance 
of one thousand seven hundred and fifty leagues, with a prodigious 
slowness, and consequently lose a large share of its cold on the route. 
The cooling then in one year would hardly amount to 575; of a de- 
gree, and sixteen thousand eight hundred years would be required 
to absorb the 7 degrees in question. But during this lapse of time, 
the incandescent globe would have repaired this loss, and the more 
certainly as the limits whence the heat departs are found to be six 
thousand fathoms nearer the incandescent surface, and the trans- 
mission of heat would be the more rapid, as the water arriving at the 
poles would be the colder. ‘Thus, although we cannot deny that the 
water at the surface of the polar regions, being colder than that at the 
bottom of the great ocean, would sink and move along the bottom of 
the sea towards the equator, yet it is not less true that this water ean- 
not there produce much refrigeration, still less reduce, in the course 
of ages, the original temperature of the bottom of the sea to zero, 
and consequently cannot resolve the problem of the low temperature 
of the bottom of the ocean. 
M. Fourier has again recourse to the temperature of the highest 
point of water without my being able to conceive how this considera- 
tion can be favorable to the hypothesis which he has adopted. Let 
this temperature be equal to +3°.75 C., as a medium between the 
experiments of MM. Hallstrone and Muncke, which appear to be 
the latest and most exact. But M. Lenz has already found this 
temperature at four hundred and fifty fathoms depth; whence it 
would follow that the rest of the depth of the ocean (five thousand 
five hundred and fifty fathoms) would have a less density, and that, 
in consequence, the superior warmer beds would fall to the bottom 
and warm it, not cool it. But there is still another consideration, 
this maximum of density does not exist in sea water; which M. 
Fourier appears to have been ignorant of. ‘The temperature at which 
this maximum takes place, is, as I have shown in my Grundriss der 
Vou. XXVI.—No. 1. 3 
