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Updated: May 7, 2025
The first supposition, that the rotatory axis of the earth had been subject to some accidental modification, and the conjecture that replaced it, namely, that a certain portion of the terrestrial sphere had been splintered off and carried into space, had both now to yield to the representation that the earth had been grazed by an unknown comet, which had caught up some scattered fragments from its surface, and was bearing them far away into sidereal regions.
Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million miles away.
The luminous shreds of the tail seemed to undergo rapid, frequent, and considerable variations of length. Herschel discerned symptoms of a movement of rotation both in the comet and in its tail. This rotatory motion carried unequal shreds from the centre towards the border, and reciprocally.
But there was the snow, as I have told. And all the earth was silent. And there was a cold, such as no living man can ever have known. The earth was now illuminated, by day, with a most doleful light, beyond my power to describe. It seemed as though I looked at the great plain, through the medium of a bronze-tinted sea. It was evident that the earth's rotatory movement was departing, steadily.
This irregular movement of the animals gives to the whole body an irregular rotatory motion; but when one is separated from the others it can only drive itself round and round upon its own centre, and has not the faculty of propelling itself as the other acalepha have. They also swim with either end foremost, in the manner the other acalepha do.
The rotatory motion in them all is produced by an apparatus that exists not only in all animals, but in plants also, and is a most important agent in sustaining the freshness and vitality of their circulating fluids and of the surrounding medium in which they live. It consists of soft fringes, called Vibratile Cilia.
An admirable opportunity for fairly estimating the dynamic effect of the sun's rays on a silk globe, whose fabric was half translucent, was offered to the French aeronauts when their balloon was spread on the grass under repair, and for this purpose inflated with the circumambient air by means of a simple rotatory fan.
A change to a higher temperature, producing a sudden thaw of this mass, might set free such a quantity of water as would form a large flood, and the southward flow of this deluge, joined to the direction which it would obtain from the rotatory motion of the globe, would of course produce that compound or south-easterly direction which the phenomena require.
Charms, such as rings of malachite, jade, bone, or silver, are often attached to the weight and chain by which the rotatory movement is given to the wheel. These praying-machines are found in every Tibetan family. Every Lama possesses one. They are kept jealously, and it is difficult for strangers to purchase the genuine ones.
Taking into account the increasing oblateness of the original spheroid in the successive stages of its concentration, and the different proportions of the detached rings, it may fairly be held that the respective rotatory motions are not at variance with the hypothesis but contrariwise tend to confirm it. Not only the directions, but also the velocities of rotation seem thus explicable.
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