ications, or more
strictly speaking, what complications it has undergone after each
cataclysm, or if I even stopped to describe one of those ancient epochs
during which the earth, the sea, and the atmosphere had for inhabitants
cold-blooded reptiles of enormous dimensions; tortoises with shells
three feet in diameter; lizards seventeen metres long; pterodactyles,
veritable flying dragons of such strange forms, that they might be
classed on good grounds either among reptiles, among mammiferous
animals, or among birds. The object, which I have proposed, does not
require that I should enter into such details; a single remark will
suffice.

Among the bones contained in the strata nearest the present surface of
the earth, are those of the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros, and the
elephant. These remains of animals of warm countries are to be found in
all latitudes. Travellers have discovered specimens of them even at
Melville Island, where the temperature descends, in the present day, 50 deg.
beneath zero. In Siberia they are found in such abundance as to have
become an article of commerce. Finally, upon the rocky shores of the
Arctic Ocean, there are to be found not merely fragments of skeletons,
but whole elephants still covered with their flesh and skin.

I should deceive myself very much, Gentlemen, if I were to suppose that
each of you had not deduced from these remarkable facts a conclusion no
less remarkable, to which indeed the fossil flora had already habituated
us; namely, that as they have grown older, the polar regions of the
earth have cooled down to a prodigious extent.

In the explanation of so curious a phenomenon, cosmologists have not
taken into account the existence of possible variations of the intensity
of the solar heat; and yet the stars, those distant suns, have not the
constant brightness which the common people attribute to them. Nay, some
of them have been observed to diminish in a sufficiently short space of
time to the hundredth part of their original brightness; and several
have even totally disappeared. They have preferred to attribute every
thing to an internal or primitive heat with which the earth was at some
former epoch impregnated, and which is gradually being dissipated in
space.

Upon this hypothesis the inhabitants of the polar regions, although
deprived of the sight of the sun for whole months together, must have
evidently enjoyed, at very ancient epochs, a temperature equal to that