5 deg. C., might involve the entire earth, if the
eruption proved sufficiently powerful, travelling chiefly in a direction
contrary to the earth's west-to-east motion, the only regions which
would certainly be exempt being the colder regions of the Arctic
circles, where the vapour of the acid would assume the liquid state, and
fall as rain. He did not anticipate that vegetation would be permanently
affected, unless the eruption were of inconceivable duration and
activity, for though the poisonous quality of hydrocyanic acid consisted
in its sudden and complete arrest of oxidation, vegetation had two
sources of life--the soil as well as the air; with this exception, all
life, down to the lowest evolutionary forms, would disappear (here was
the one point in which he was somewhat at fault), until the earth
reproduced them. For the rest, he fixed the rate of the on-coming cloud
at from 100 to 105 miles a day; and the date of eruption, either the
14th, 15th, or 16th of April--which was either one, two, or three days
after the arrival of the _Boreal_ party at the Pole; and he concluded by
saying that, if the facts were as he had stated them, then he could
suggest no hiding-place for the race of man, unless such places as mines
and tunnels could be made air-tight; nor could even they be of use to
any considerable number, except in the event of the poisonous state of
the air being of very short duration.
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