new species. It would, however, appear that Jupiter, afterwards yielding to the deep grief and the incessant lamentations of his sister, granted that her daughter should only live six months in the year with her husband below, and the other six months with the gods above.
Such as we have here endeavoured to sketch it in a few rapid outlines, was the kingdom of Pluto in the ideal conception of the ancient Greeks, that nation of poets. To us, alack and alas for the poetry of the thing—to us, the sons of a hard, stern, matter-of-fact age, a very different image presents itself. We still make use of the name, indeed, but the god, with all that pertained unto him, has departed for ever and ever more. Our “Pluto’s Kingdom ” is the mass of liquid fire that constitutes the inner kernel of the earth. To us, he is the Great Fire-King, and he and his realm are one.
It is now an almost universally received notion, by astronomers as well as by geologists, that this globe of ours, as indeed all other planetary bodies, once existed in a gaseous form, and was subsequently, by chemical combination of the gases constituting it, and consequent evolution of heat, gradually condensed into a glowing, fusing mass, which being whirled round in space, ultimately assumed, under the conjoint action of gravity and the rotatory projecting impulse inherent in it, its present state and orange-shaped form, the surface or “crust” gradually cooling and hardening in process of time.
