What is the Torrid zone? It is that part of the Earth comprised between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Every place within this zone has the Sun in the zenith twice a year. What are the Temperate zones? The part comprised between the Tropics and the Polar circles; between 23° 28′ and 66° 32′ of latitude, and in which the Sun never rises to the zenith, but is above the horizon on every day in the year. What are the Frigid zones? That part of the circumpolar regions in which the Sun does not rise above the horizon on every day in the year; while at the Pole itself he does not rise for six months at a time. The height of the Sun above the horizon is the cause of the excessive heat of the Torrid zone, the moderate heat of the Temperate zone, and the excessive cold within the Polar circles. When the axis became perpendicular these things would be different. The Sun would remain on the plane of the Equator. All the year round he would pursue his imperturbable twelve-hour course, and rise to a distance from the zenith according to the latitude of the place. In countries of twenty degrees of latitude he would rise seventy degrees above the horizon; in countries of forty-nine degrees of latitude he would rise forty-one; in places of eighty-four degrees he would rise six, and of ninety degrees (the Pole), he would just peep half his diameter above the horizon. The days would be perfectly regular, and the Sun would rise at the same time, and also at the same point on the horizon, throughout the year. “Look at the advantages!” said the friends of Barbicane. “Every man, according to his temperament, can choose his own climate, which will be invariable!” Those modern Titans, the North Polar Practical Association, were going to effect a complete change in the state of things which had existed ever since the spheroid had been launched on its orbit to become the Earth as we know it. The astronomer might lose a few of the familiar constellations; the poet might lose the long winter nights and the long summer days that figure so frequently in modern verse; but what of that when we think of the advantages that would be enjoyed by the majority of the human race? As the newspapers in the Barbicane interest pointed out, the products of the Earth being reduced to regularity, the farmer could always plant and sow in the most favourable temperature. “Be it so!” said the opposition. “But are we to have no rains, or hail, or storms, or waterspouts, or other odds and ends that make matters pleasant for the depressed agriculturist?”