Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 edition. Excerpt: ... the possible total of plutonic energy at present in the earth, by tracing its history backwards to its probable origin. Part III.--Note On The Meteor1c Theory Of The Sun's Heat. From Report of the Glasgow Philosophical Society's Meeting of March 24, 1869. 40. SIR Wm. THOMSON, in reply to a question from the President, Dr. Bryce, said that his contribution to the meteoric theory of solar heat had been to point out that the meteoric supply could not be perennial. In his paper "On the Mechanical Energies of the Solar System" Trans. R.S.E., April, 1854: republished in Math. and Phys. Papers, Vol. II., pp. 1-25), he had shown that meteors falling from extraplanetary space in sufficient abundance to generate the heat emitted from the sun for the last 2000 years, must, by the augmentation they must have brought to the central mass, have caused a gradual shortening of the year of which the accumulated effect during that period must have dislocated the seasons to the extent of a month and a half. But observation proves that there has been a dislocation of the seasons only to the extent of about an hour and three-quarters, since a certain eclipse of the moon was seen on March 19, 721 B.C., in Babylon. It is quite certain, therefore, that meteoric supply for sun heat has not within historical periods come from distant space outside the earth's orbit. He therefore found it necessary to modify the meteoric hypothesis of sun-heat--a hypothesis which he had learned from a communication by Mr. Waterston to the British Association at Hull in 1853, but which he has since found had been previously proposed by Mayer. If it is true that the heat emitted by the sun is compensated from year to year by meteors, he proved that instead of a certain quantity of...
