Abstract
THE lecture and the letter of Sir Robert Ball, however lucid, do not appear to carry this question further than where Dr. Croll left it. It is easy to understand that when the shape of the earth's orbit was different, winter days might be colder and summer days hotter than now. What the theory at present wants is an exposition of the successive series of effects by which this state of climates would transform the Emerald Isle into a mere Greenland. It is scarcely an explanation to say that “vast fluctuations like these must correspond to vast climatic changes of the kind postulated.” We desire to be shown that they will correspond, and that the correspondence will be of the kind required. Taking Sir Robert Ball's own illustration, I am quite ready to admit that his horse alternately starved and crammed will not run a dead heat with one uniformly fed; but in default of experience I should not feel certain that his animal would die of accumulated fat.
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HILL, E. The Astronomical Theory of the Great Ice Age. Nature 35, 101 (1886). https://doi.org/10.1038/035101a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/035101a0
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