- [Footnote: and of latitude. Would not the climate of Germany be
wonderfully altered, and that perhaps for centuries, if there were opened a fissure a thousand fathoms in depth, reaching from the shores of the Adriatic to the Baltic? If in the present condition of our planet, the stable equilibrium of temperature, first calculated by Fourier in his Théorie analytique de la chaleur, has been almost completely restored by radiation from the earth into space; and if the external atmosphere now only communicates with the molten interior through the inconsiderable openings of a few volcanoes,—in the earlier state of things numerous clefts and fissures, produced by the frequently recurring corrugations of the rocky strata of the globe, emitted streams of heated air which mingled with the atmosphere and were entirely independent of latitude. Every planet must thus in its earliest condition have for a time determined its own temperature, which afterwards becomes dependent on the position relatively to the central body, the Sun. The surface of the Moon also shows traces of this reaction of the interior upon the crust.]
