Travers.—On the former Warmth in high Northern Latitudes. 465 
therefore says that ** he will assume that water belongs to the atmosphere, 
and, in the present order of things, should be found as a constituent of the 
atmosphere of all the orbs of space; the state of its existence, whether 
solid, fluid, or gaseous, whether combined as water, or separated into 
its constituents of free hydrogen and free oxygen, being dependent on the 
physical conditions to which it is subjected.” 
Now, it is scarcely necessary for me to remark that all life, as it is 
known to us, is dependent upon the existence of water. This is a fact which 
we learn from any elementary work on physiology, and we are, therefore, 
justified in assuming that until water existed on our globe, at a temperature 
not inconsistent with life, no life could be developed upon it. You have 
before you on the table a series of specimens taken from the hot waters of 
springs in the Rotomahana district, showing, in all probability, the very 
highest temperatures compatible with the existence of living organisms, and 
we may look back to a period counted, probably, by hundreds of millions 
of years, when such low forms of life were the only ones which were to be 
found on the surface of our planet. And this brings me to the immediate 
subject of this paper, namely, had the heat radiated from the interior of our 
globe, any effect upon climate during the earlier periods of life brought 
under our notice by the geological records? I venture, for reasons which I 
will proceed to explain, to agree with the older ideas on the subject, in spite 
of the positive opinions expressed by Sir Charles Lyell. 
It is clear that long before the surface conditions of our globe were such 
as to permit of the condensation of aqueous vapour upon it, it revolved 
round the sun in the orbit which it now occupies, and that even then the 
heat of its equatorial regions received a large increase from the latter body. 
It will have been observed that the depth to which the surface is now 
permanently heated by the rays of the sun diminishes with great rapidity as 
we approach the equatorial regions, but there is no reason for supposing 
that during the gradual cooling of the globe, the radiation of heat would, 
even supposing the absence of any check due to the sun’s rays, have been 
greater from the equatorial regions than from the polar ones. The contrary 
must, in effect, have been the case, and the polar regions of our globe were 
doubtless the earliest to present surface conditions fitted to retain water 
upon them. If this were so, then certainly life must, in its earliest stages, 
have had its origin in arctic latitudes, gradually extending towards the 
tropics as the surface of the latter regions became sufficiently cool to permit 
water to accumulate there also. It will, of course, be understood that the 
accumulation of water on our globe was very slow, and I cannot but think 
that the arguments brought forward by Mr. Mattieu Williams, in the work 
alluded to, as to the materials which constitute the fuel of the sun, apply 
H2 
