“So that it is not the snow, nor the glaciers which will cover the earth, but the frozen remnant of the sea. For a long time previously streams and rivers will have ceased to exist and every atmospheric current will have disappeared, unless indeed, before giving up the ghost, the sun shall have passed through one of those spasms to which we referred a moment ago, shall have released the ice from sleep and have produced new clouds and aerial currents, reawakened the springs, the brooks and the rivers, and after this momentary but deceitful awakening, shall have fallen back again into lethargy. That day will have no morrow.” Another voice, that of a celebrated electrician, was heard from the center of the hemicycle. “All these theories of death by cold,” he observed, “are plausible. But the end of the world by fire? This has been referred to only in connection with the comet. It may happen otherwise. “Setting aside a possible sinking of the continents into the central fire, brought about by an earthquake on a large scale, or some widespread dislocation of the earth’s crust, it seems to me that, without any collision, a superior will might arrest our planet midway in its course and transform its motion into heat.” “A will?” interrupted another voice. “But positive science does not admit the possibility of miracles in nature.” “Nor I, either,” replied the electrician. “When I say ‘will,’ I mean an ideal, invisible force. Let me explain. “The earth is flying through space with a velocity of 106,000 kilometers per hour, or 29,460 meters per second. If some star, active or extinct, should emerge from space, so as to form with the sun a sort of electro-dynamic couple with our planet on its axis, acting upon it like a brake—if, in a word, for any reason, the earth should be suddenly arrested in its orbit, its mechanical energy would be changed into molecular motion, and its temperature would be suddenly raised to such a degree as to reduce it entirely to a gaseous state.” “Gentlemen,” said the director of the Mont Blanc observatory, from his chair, “the earth might perish by fire in still another manner. We have lately seen in the sky a temporary star which, in a few weeks, passed from the sixteenth to the fourth magnitude. This distant sun had suddenly become 50,000 times hotter and more luminous. If such a fate should overtake our sun, nothing living would be left upon our planet. It is probable, from the study of the spectrum of the light emitted by this burning star, that the cause of this sudden conflagration was the entrance of this sun and its system into some kind of nebula. Our own sun is travelling with a frightful velocity in the direction of the constellation of Hercules, and may very well some day encounter an obstacle of this nature.”