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Rh coming?" said Ezariel. "I see a vast fire raging over the sea."

Then we looked from our windows and saw, far over the heaving waves, a long line of blazing fire, as of huge masses burning.

"Perhaps this world," said Arauniel, "is still unformed. As you saw in the Moon a dead world, worn out, exhausted, where life is destroyed and finished with,—here may be an imperfect world, a huge mass yet developing, which has not thoroughly cooled."

"Perhaps so," I replied, "as upon the Earth it would seem, when the cooling process had gone on for many ages, the sea was first inhabited by living beings, before the land was properly formed."

"One thing has struck me," he said, "ever since I came here,—the much greater heat of this world than we expected. Men, as you say, supposed that this giant planet would be too cold for an abode of life because it is so far from the Sun, and yet now the air is far hotter than it is even in our own sunny world, and even the tropics of Earth are never so hot as this. But the heat here is plainly internal, not solar. It is from Jupiter himself, and not from the Sun."

"There is one origin of the heat plainly,"