Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/226

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more difficult to evaporate continued their downward course. Finally, all would again be reduced to a state of vapor.

What, then, had been accomplished by all this turmoil and activity? Merely this: a large quantity of heat had been conveyed from the interior of the system to the exterior; for this it is which all cyclones accomplish. This it is which lends them their power. On our earth it is the sun's heat mainly which the cyclone carries away to the limits of the atmosphere. In the sun itself it is a portion of the primeval stock of heat which is removed.

The cyclone may therefore be defined as the universal cooler of creation. There is not a sun which lights the midnight sky, or which the telescope has brought within mortal ken, which is not vastly indebted to the cyclone. Though so simple as easily to be understood by a child, it is a powerful means by which the Almighty-works. It is a key to very many of the secrets of the universe. When we watch the snow-storm and the rain, we are really watching the method by which God has proceeded in forming his worlds since ever the cooling process began. Thus have the storms raged and the winds howled throughout the universe for countless ages; and by that rain, and snow, and hail, has all the solid and liquid substance of the worlds been formed. Every particle of it has been rained and snowed again and again. Nor is the process yet completed. The cyclone has by no means done its work yet. Its task will be finished only when the last particle of gas is converted into a liquid or solid. It is going on all around us. If there appears to be a balance at present upon the earth, if the solidifying power of the cyclone appears to be at a stand-still, it is only because its efforts are counteracted by the extraneous heat we receive from the sun.

The cyclone may also have assisted at the birth of the planets. Those stupendous meteors of thousands of millions of miles of elevation must necessarily have caused immense gaseous masses to bulge out from the general level of the surface of the incipient solar system. This might be sufficient under exceptional conditions, and when the balance between the centrifugal and the centripetal forces was nearly equal, to turn it in favor of the former, and thus generate a planet.

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SYLVIUS said that man had formerly an intermaxillary bone. If he has it no longer, he ought to have it. In this he was right. The same Sylvius, in his answer to Vesalius, said that Galen was not wrong when he described man as having seven bones in his sternum,