The Indianapolis journal., 1884-11-23
HOW THE WORLD Is GOING TO DIE,

HOW THE WORLD Is GOING TO DIE
The journal reports Prof. Proctor as saying,
in his recent lecture here, that all the mem
bers of the solar system had passed, or were
passing, through the various stages of youth
middle age, old age and death, closely analo-
gous to the ordinary course of human life
In old age, he believes, 'the ocean will per
colate through the crust of the earth into
inner recesses, and the atmosphere be alb
sorbed in the process of the change of matter
from an organic to an inorganic state Then
the earth, airless and waterless, will support
life no longer, and die as the moon has died,
to remain the corpse of world till the sun
runs its course and dies, and the earth, as
Byron says, "swing blind and blackening in
the moonless air." when "a new heaven and
new earth" may come as predicted in Revela-
ton. This theory, however is not peculiar
to Mr.. Proctor, as we have seen it advanced
by other scientists. The present condition of
the moon, with no sign Of air or water-un-
less the recent alleged discoveries of a Berlin
astronomer, indicating the existence of abun-
dant life, and apparently a human form of
life, too, should be verifed-supports this
theory 1t ftly closes the course of evolution
Of planet and has, at least, the support of
analogy which is more than any other theory
death has.
Prof. Winchell, of Ann Arbor, suggested
the possibility, in lecture here some years
ago, of the complete denudation of the rocky
skeleton of the earth by the wash of its rivers
and smaller streams which would bury all
cultivable soil and possibility of supporting
human life in the deep bosom of the ocean"
But as the wash of all the rivers now in ex-
istence forms deltas at their mouths, which in
turn become cultivable and lfe-supporting
it would look as if this infiction of natural
law bore its own compensation. A French
savant thinks that in time the accretion of
ice about one OF the other of the poles will
become so vast and overbearing that it will
change the direction of the earth's axis, shift
the poles to points nearer the equator and
empty the oceans out upon the continents
sweeping away all life, as the Bible says the
Noachian delnge did, except what may be
saved by similar process, if such a process
should be possible. Very little attention or
credit appears to have been given to this sug
gestion, which was advanced some dozen or
more years ago.
Another mode of exterminating our world
is to shorten its orbital revolution year by
yes.r, making its course in the heavens a spiral
winding to point, till it falls into the sun and
burns up the grandest case of cremation ever
imagined. Or, as a sort of related catastrophe,
Venus or Mercury may fall into the infinite
furnace-though Mr.. C. P. Jacobs proves
that it is not furnace" it is handy
to call it so-and by its collision develop
heat so enormous as to burn up all life on the
earth before its own turn at the great funeral
pyre comes. Rev. DR.. Cox, of New York,
some dozen Or more years ago, suggested-or,
rather, was so reported-that the internal
heat of the earth would gradually melt the
nearer strata that has hardened about it, and
keep on melting its way to the surface, till it
would burst out food of fiery lava all over
the habitable surface, and under all the
waters that cover the remainder. DIR. Cox
was a man of brains and scientific knowledge,
aud he probably neither advanced nor enter
tanned any such preposterous notion. AS the
earth began with crust so thin that the fiery
mess beneath was constantly bursting it, and
driving all moisture off into the atmosphere,
as Jupiter is doing now, and this shell has
steadily thickened and hardened in the geolog-
ic ages that have elapsed, it is the very
idiocy of logic to suppose that this course of
cooling through millions of years is going to
change or is changing so that the central
heat" will recover its former condition of
melting the crust off.
The latest theory of the earth's death makes
the tides the deadly weapon. The moon, it
says, catches hold of the water as the earth
sevolves, and holds it, as it were, which causes
friction, and consequent loss of power. The
retardation of axial revolution is illustrated by
holding the hand on the rim of rapidly turn
ing wheel. 1t will move more and more
slowly, till it finally stops. The tides are
doing this for the earth, checking its daily
motion slowly and slightly, but still prevent
Ing it from coming exactly up to the mark of
be year or the century before. This Of