Would the comet furnish us with such heat?  Let me call another witness to the stand: 

In the great work of Amédée Guillemin, already cited, we read: 

“On the other hand, it seems proved that the light of the comets is, in part, at least, borrowed from the sun.  But may they not also possess a light of their own?  And, on this last hypothesis, is this brightness owing to a kind of phosphorescence, or to the state of incandescence of the nucleus?  Truly, if the nuclei of comets be incandescent, the smallness of their mass would eliminate from the danger of their contact with the earth only one element of destruction:  the temperature of the terrestrial atmosphere would be raised to an elevation inimical to the existence of organized beings; and we should only escape the danger of a mechanical shock, to run into a not less frightful

[1.  Gratacap, “The Ice Age,” in “Popular Science Monthly,” January, 1818, p. 321.]

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one of being calcined in a many days passage through an immense furnace."[1]

Here we have a good deal more heat than is necessary to account for that vaporization of the seas of the globe which seems to have taken place during the Drift Age.

But similar effects might be produced, in another way, even though the heat of the comet itself was inconsiderable.

Suppose the comet, or a large part of it, to have fallen into the sun.  The arrested motion would be converted into heat.  The material would feed the combustion of the sun.  Some have theorized that the sun is maintained by the fall of cometic matter into it.  What would be the result?

Mr. Proctor notes that in 1866 a star, in the constellation Northern Cross, suddenly shone with eight hundred times its former luster, afterward rapidly diminishing in luster.  In 1876 a new star in the constellation Cygnus became visible, subsequently fading again so as to be only perceptible by means of a telescope; the luster of this star must have increased from five hundred to many thousand times.

Mr. Proctor claims that should our sun similarly increase in luster even one hundred-fold, the glowing heat would destroy all vegetable and animal life on earth.

There is no difficulty in seeing our way to heat enough, if we concede that a comet really struck the earth or fell into the sun.  The trouble is in the other direction—­we would have too much heat.

We shall see, hereafter, that there is evidence in our rocks that in two different ages of the world, millions of years before the Drift period, the whole surface of the

[1.  “The Heavens,” p. 260.]

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earth was actually fused and melted, probably by cometic contact.

This earth of ours is really a great powder-magazine there is enough inflammable and explosive material about it to blow it into shreds at any moment.