Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/516

510 ; or if anything, also its converse.) And so Jupiter's equinoxes (and if Jupiter's, the equinoxes of the other planets) are adopted 'as the main cause of the disturbances of the sun, and consequently the whole solar system.'

With this adoption of the equinoxes, it becomes necessary to know when these equinoxes actually occur. Now of all things concerning the planets—with the one exception of the earth—astronomers are able to tell us least about their equinoxes. This is because they have discovered no law pervading the obliquity of the axes of the various planets, and hence the inclination of the planes of their respective equators to their paths around the sun. This inclination produces seasons, as it brings the sun a part of the year above their equators and part of the year below. Hence, we know but very little about the seasons of the other planets. The inclination of the earth's equinoctial to the ecliptic is a constant, and so the several seasons should be constant if abnormalities were not the result of other causes.

One point, however, about which there seems to be no uncertainty is that no planet has fixed equinoctial points. The 'precession of the equinoxes of the earth' was settled back in the days of Sir Isaac Newton. At present the earth is in perihelion (the point of her orbit nearest the sun) very nearly at the time of her winter solstice. But the times of perihelion and aphelion come a few minutes earlier every year, so in the course of several thousand years the earth's perihelion will have gone backward in the year until it comes at the time of autumnal equinox, when the sun's distance from the earth will be the same in the winters and summers of both hemispheres. After another few thousand years the time of perihelion will come in the summer of the northern hemisphere. Then any difference of climate in the two hemispheres caused by the variation in the earth's distance from the sun will be the reverse of now. Not alone do all the planets revolve upon their axes, but the sun itself so revolves. His axis of revolution is not quite perpendicular to the ecliptic, with the result that the plane of his equator has an inclination of a few degrees to the plane of the earth's orbit—and also to the orbits of the other planets. In consequence of this slight angle the earth—and likewise each of the other planets—is exposed to the north pole of the sun during one half of its year and the south pole during the other half.

Now, according to Mr. Tice's theory, the influence exerted by the planets upon the sun, and retroactive, is entirely electrical, and hence not the force of universal gravitation. A safe assumption, as almost anything that we can not explain in any other way, may be laid to some form of electric energy with least chance of its being disproved. So electric energy and the equinoxes of the planets became the basis of the Tice electro-equinoctial theory. What foundation stones for his great