in person. The young men escorted Campion
home, and saw him safe and warm in bed; but
it was long ere he recovered from the cudgelling
of the unholy beast.

As to the hare, satisfied, no doubt, with
having felt the weight of Campion's arm, he
never reappeared in the place, where he is still
remembered under the title of Campion's Hare.

THE FIRE SEA.

THE earth billow, the movement of which was
felt during several seconds about 3.22, Greenwich
time, in the morning of Tuesday, the 6th
of October, 1863, over a great part of England,
gives a fresh interest to the hypothesis of a
central sea of fire. This guess is now almost
universally received by the authorities in geology
and geography. There are, indeed, properly
speaking, no authorities in science, proof being
everything and men nothing; but the men who
obtain prevalence for their views by supporting
them with apparently satisfactory proofs,
are by courtesy called authorities; and it is the
fact that most of these men, after studying the
structure, the history, and the occurrences befalling
the Earth, teach at present the doctrine
of central heat.

The planet Earth is, like all the others, of
celestial origin. "The planets are formed," says
La Place, "by the condensation of zones of
vapours." And Buffon says: "The terrestrial
globe has precisely the form which would be
taken by a fluid globe turning upon itself with
the swiftness which, as we know, belongs to the
globe of the Earth. Thus the first consequence
which flows from this incontestable fact is, that
the matter of which our Earth is composed was
in a state of fluidity at the moment when it took
its form." La Place was of opinion that, considering
the prodigious distance which separates
our planet from the other planets, the fluid out
of which it was formed must have been of immense
extent. The ideas of La Place and Buffon
were no doubt suggested by the imaginings of
Descartes, who, deriving the stars from vortices,
or whirlpools of burning particles, globules, or
matter, the heavier or coarser outside conceives
the planet Earth which we inhabit to be an
encrusted sun. Voltaire tried to ridicule this
notion. For, not only the "fool," but the man
of genius, and every man in proportion as he is
irreverent and ignorant, in the words of the
poet,

still hath an itching to deride,
And fain would be upon the laughing side.

In his Dialogues d'Evhémère, Voltaire calls
Descartes, Cardestes. Evhémère says: "Cardestes
has divined that our nest was first of all
an encrusted sun."

Cellicrate.— "A crusted sun! You are
joking."

Evhémère.— "It is this Cardestes, no doubt,
who was joking when he said that we were formerly
composed of subtile and globular matter,
but that our materials having thickened, we
have lost our brilliancy and our force. Now-a-days
we have tumbled out of the whirlpool in
which we were centres and masters, into the
whirlpool of the sun. We are covered all over
with branched and channelled matter. Finally,
from being a sun which we were, we are become
a moon, having, by favour, another little moon
around us to console us in our disgrace."

The ideas which Descartes imagined, and Voltaire
ridiculed, Leibnitz proved in his Protogœa.
He found in the depths of the Earth, matter—
molten, calcined, and vitrified by fire. The
stars, he said, were of themselves luminous
bodies. After burning during long epochs, their
combustible matter having been exhausted, they
became extinguished, forming a vitreous crust.

The planet Earth, this crusted sun, is covered
for by far the greater part for three-fourths of
its surface by an ocean of water, and it is clad
all round in an ocean of air. The earth is a
reflecting globe. As yet nobody knows the
thickness of the crust of the globe. As yet
nobody knows the depth of the sea of water.
As yet nobody knows the height of the ocean
of air. The crust we know consists chiefly of
quartz. The ideas of Descartes and Leibnitz,
Buffon and La Place, were apparently corroborated
by the experiments of Mitscherlich and
others, who, by submitting the matters comprising
the primitive rocks to the heat of furnaces,
have reproduced their crystals; fire can
make them, and therefore fire has made them.
The crust was made by fire. The oscillations
of the solar heat in the aërial covering of the
Earth make the vicissitudes of the seasons;
and the changes in the atmospheric pressure
upon the surface of land and water. If the
Earth were warmed by sun-rays only the heat
would decrease continually as we sink wells or
dig mines downwards, while, on the contrary,
we soon reach a point where the temperature is
equable, stationary, invariable; and then in
descending lower and lower and further and
further from the solar heat, the Earth's heat
makes itself more and more felt, the rate of
increase only being different in the reports of
observers, while respecting the increase they
are unanimous. M. Elie de Beaumont is of
opinion that if there were no solar heat whatever,
enough of terrestrial heat would reach the
surface annually all round the globe to melt a
sheet of ice a quarter of an inch thick. Calculations
have, indeed, been made of the depth
of the crust and the height of the air, but they
are far from satisfactory to minds exigent of
certitude. The savans of the last generation
had a very easy way of making those calculations,
saying the cold increases so many degrees
as we mount up certain distances, and the heat
increases so many degrees as we dig down certain
distances, the aërial ocean is, therefore, so
many leagues high, and the mineral layers are
so many leagues thick! But the problem is not
so easy.

"Earthquakes," says M. de Quatrefages,
"make the soil of our fields undulate like an
agitated sea, and sometimes shake at once both