Omega

the north and west of Paris this double action of the subsidence of the land and the wearing away of the shores had, in less than seven thousand years, made Paris accessible to ships of the greatest tonnage. ↩

Of all terrestrial substances water has the greatest specific heat. It cools more slowly than any other. Its specific heat is four times greater than that of air. When the temperature of a kilogram of water falls one degree, it raises the temperature of four kilograms of air one degree. But water is seven hundred and seventy times heavier than air, so that if we compare two equal volumes of water and air, we find that a cubic meter of water, in losing one degree of temperature, raises the temperature of seven hundred and seventy times four, or 3080 cubic meters of air by the same amount. This is the explanation of the influence of the sea in modifying the climate of continents. The heat of summer is stored in the ocean and is slowly given out in winter. This explains why islands and seashores have no extremes of climate. The heat of summer is tempered by the breezes, and the cold of winter is alleviated by the heat stored in the water. ↩

Many readers will regard this climate quite bearable, inasmuch, as in our own day regions may be cited whose mean temperature is much lower, yet which are nevertheless habitable, as, for example, Verchnoiansk, whose mean annual temperature is −19.3°. But in these regions there is a summer during which the ice melts; and if in January the temperature falls to −60°, and even lower, in July they enjoy a temperature of fifteen and twenty degrees above zero. But at the stage which we have now reached in the history of the world, this mean temperature of the equatorial zone was constant, and it was impossible for ice ever to melt again. ↩

List of Illustrations

1. Diagram showing the intersection of the comet’s orbit with that of the Earth.

2. Diagram of the outer solar system showing the paths of various comets and the planets.

3. The telephonoscope message sent from Mars, showing pictograms of the comet, the Moon, the Earth and the estimated impact point in Italy.

Colophon

Omega
was published in 1894 by
Camille Flammarion.
It was translated from French in 1894 by
J. B. Walker.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
David Grigg,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2018 by
Richard Tonsing and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
HathiTrust Digital Library.

The cover page is adapted from
Gordale Scar,
a painting completed in 1812 by
James Ward.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
September 10, 2018, 8:12 p.m.
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Uncopyright

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