est. All this trouble and all this destruction of confidence in the purity of the bench on account of a seven-shilling lawsuit about a cat! Somehow, it seemed to "size" the country.

At this point we observed that an English flag had just been placed at halfmast on a building a hundred yards away. I and my friends were busy in an instant trying to imagine whose death, among the island dignitaries, could command such a mark of respect as this. Then a shudder shook them and me at the same moment, and I knew that we had jumped to one and the

same conclusion: "The governor has gone to England; it is for the British admiral!"

At this moment Mr. Smith noticed the flag. He said with emotion:

"That's on a boarding-house. I judge there's a boarder dead.'

A dozen other flags within view went to half-mast.

"It's a boarder, sure," said Smith. "But would they half-mast the flags here for a boarder, Mr. Smith?"

"Why, certainly they would, if he was dead."

That seemed to size the country again.
Mark Twain.

EVERY one knows how widely the climate of North America differs from that enjoyed by our neighbors in the more favored lands of Europe. While our autumns and springs have for a little time a decent gentleness of behavior which makes the tender allegories of those seasons seem not altogether ironical, the times between are quite generally mere brutal exhibitions of unreasoning temperatures. Just after the gentle month of June there comes a rush of tropical savage powers, as relentless as an old Saracen invasion; and while the autumn is painting all sorts of affectionate remembrances on our hills and valleys, there comes a horde of invaders from about the pole, as ruthless as Huns, slaying and scalping all the creatures of summer like barbarians as they are. Our land is a perfect war-path of the contending north and south, without defenses of seas or mountains, entirely open to both forces.

It may not seem to add much to our present satisfaction to know that the conditions were not always thus; that there was a period when we were more favored than Europe now is. This period

was not long ago, for our tulip-trees and sassafrases and other forest plants have but yesterday in the geological chronology held their own in the long night of the poles, and flourished greatly in the long day of their summer. On the shores of Greenland, within twelve degrees of the pole, we have buried forests which are much like those now flourishing on the banks of the Mississippi below the junction of the Ohio; the plants are so like those that now make up the vegetation of the southern half of the United States that these forests about the pole must have looked even more like those now found in Kentucky and Missouri than those of New England of to-day. This is but one thread in a strong line of evidence leading us to the conviction that the temperature of the north pole is far more rigorous now than in the immediate past; that at a time possibly not more remote than the age of the earliest human remains which have been found, the icewrapped lands of the north were bathed in a temperate and little-varied air, and so flowed over by perpetual streams of heat that even the long night of its winter could not bring as bitter cold as

comes each year to the shores of the Hudson and the Upper Ohio. In place of contending with the fleets of the icebergs, the overtopping glaciers that tear the mountains down and chain up the seas, a voyager of that age could have sailed through sombre forests and verdant mountains, and in the long summer's day found his unbroken way from the southern lands to the pole.

It is difficult to conceive how great must have been the difference in the climate of North America when its north winds came over endless forests in place of the vast fields of polar snow and ice; when even in the depth of winter the wind at its start could have been but little below the freezing-point in its bitterest season. Fancy the shores of Hudson's Bay and Great Slave Lake with a climate like the north of England; the whole of that great land north of the Laurentian Hills and the Saskatchewan

now dead for nine months of the year, and only faintly stirred by the breath of a brief summer which is but a spasm of life with seasons which could have hardly been more rigorous than those of Ireland of to-day! The north of Europe and of Asia must have been equally favored in that happily balanced time. Siberia could not have had its ever-frozen soil, on which vegetation clings as lichen on a rock, for the condition that brought forests to Northern Greenland could not have left any part of the northern continents under the strong bondage of cold.

Looking, amid the sulphuric air of a New England house furnace, out over a New England frozen earth and sky swept by a ruthless north wind as merciless as flame, we feel it impossible to be quite content with the order that sent us to this frozen heritage, where the fossil sunshine of the old coal banks makes poor amends for the vanished warmth of an earlier day. Some solace may, perhaps, be had from a study of the condition that made the differences between that day and this what they are. We may thereby see that the changes have been a part of great physical laws; that they are, moreover, results of the great forces that bring about the successions

in the animate and inanimate world, and not the accidents of an unruled chance. It is perhaps easier to bear the inconveniences that come from a plan than to endure the results of mere vagrant forces. The causes which are at work in shaping the climatal conditions of North America are in a way remote, so that the reader will have to exercise some patience in following even in outline the workings of the great agents that determine the distribution of heat and cold over the surface of the earth. But there are no great mysteries about the matter, for the earth, however complex in details of structure, has in its general order the same simplicity which we find in the heavens.

When naturalists first became convinced that the earth had once borne vegetation of a luxuriant kind, semitropical in its character, within the arctic circle, and especially when it was found that at other times the glaciers had marched far to the south, there was a very common desire to look to mighty convulsions, to wandering comets that turned the earth away in her course, bringing poles where the equator was before, or to general outbreaks of inter-. nal fire that warmed the earth's surface from thousands of volcanic craters, to explain the perplexing changes. Slowly but with no backward course there has come the conviction that the even-minded earth has always in the past gone on much as at present, the changes of each day falling in with those of yesterday and to-morrow, and so building up revolutions from alterations which are each slight in themselves. This way of looking at the world has become the most important of the properties of our modern science, and is the slow-grown faith of a thousand years. Following its teachings the student of nature endeavors to find in the things at work about him today the key to the changes of the past, only accepting the intervention of forces which he does not see constantly at work when these permanent causes fail to explain the mystery he is exploring.

A little observation, even with eye and mind untrained, will show any one that the great machinery of the earth's move

life could find a foot-hold a perfect battle-ground of the elements; so that even in the strip of twenty or thirty degrees of width where the temperature conditions would seem to permit life, it is questionable whether any considerable develop ment of this life would be possible.

When we have once come to see that not only are the ocean currents powerful instruments of climatic correction, but that the very existence of organic life depends on their work, we are willing to look to the accidents of their course for the causes of great climatic changes. It is easily seen that if by geographical changes these ocean currents were excluded from their ancient tracts, or admitted to new fields, the world's climate could be greatly bettered. If, for example, the relatively shallow water between Iceland and Scandinavia were to be changed to dry land, so as to shut out the Gulf Stream from the Arctic Ocean, there is not the smallest doubt that the climate of Europe would suffer somewhat the same change as has come of late to North America. In place of a rather mild northern sea, the waters which lave the arctic shores of that continent and Northern Asia would be visited by an even deeper cold than now makes desolate the shores of the northernmost lands of our own continent, while Southern and Western Europe would receive more heat and moisture than now fall to their lot. If the reader will take a globe or a good world-map in hand, he will see that our greater and more easily conceived climatal variations can occur through very simple geographical modifications. He will see that while the arctic circle is wide open to the Atlantic, the Pacific shores draw close their lines in the north, giving but a narrow and a shallow strait to unite the Arctic and the Pacific waters. He will see that the Pacific gulf stream, the Kuru Sivo of the Japanese, possessing a current probably much greater in power than our Atlantic Gulf Stream, sweeps off the coast of Asia, and pours its waters into the great bay formed by the converging shores of Asia and America. Into this bay and along its shores the heat is discharged in great volume,

but much of it finds its way back into tropical waters, unexpended. Perhaps not a hundredth part of it drifts through the difficult passage of Behring Strait into the polar sea. Yet even this slender thread of tropical water keeps a somewhat open sea in this section in the depth of the sunless winter. If the vast lowlying districts of Eastern Siberia and Western Alaska were sunk beneath the sea, even to the depth of a few hundred feet, a trifling change in the great mechanism of the continents, it would open wide the road of this vast ocean stream straightway to the pole. The immediiate result of this change is in good part told us by the effects of the Atlantic Gulf Stream. The temperature of the interarctic region is now lifted at least as much as thirty degrees by the action of the Gulf Stream. An equal effect would be exercised by the Japanese current when the great gates were thrown wide open by the recurring geological changes. Thirty degrees is the least rise in the annual temperature of the region about the pole that would come from the action of this great Japanese current if it could make its way to the north as freely as does the Gulf Stream. Whenever the Alaskan gates to the pole are unbarred, the whole of the ice-cap of the circumpolar regions must at once melt away; all the plants of the northern continents, now kept in narrow bounds by the arctic cold, would begin their march towards the pole. The plants of the Ohio Valley would soon come again on to the Greenland shores. The Gulf Stream and the Pacific stream would bring not only their life-sustaining heat, but at the same time a great store of the seeds of the plants which would be candidates for the new places in the awakened lands. The Gulf Stream is every day taking a great quantity of seeds to the northern shores of Europe and America; trees stuck full of acorns and nuts by the busy woodpeckers and other seed-garnering animals are carried by the winter storms into the great rivers, and by them carried on into the Gulf of Mexico; in time they are borne, along with other seeds of plants, in great plenty, even as far as

just along the meridian.

This peculiar

ity may seem unimportant, but in fact it is one of the most important links in the great chain of connection which has made our earth a fit place for the development of life. Every one who has lived by the sea or any large lake knows how a strong wind can urge the surface water before it, and so can picture to himself how the trade-winds drive along the waters they blow over. If these streams came down in vertical lines from the poles they would meet each other so as to make dead water; but meeting obliquely, the result is to cause a current setting from east to west, and filling a broad space, some hundreds of miles across, beneath the equator. In the faroff day when the lands were small, this current may well have gone on in a steady way encircling the earth in its unbroken course; but from the time that the continents came up to bar its way it was no longer a girdle around the earth in which each particle swam continually in the same latitude, but it became a set of great whirlpools. If the reader has grasped the cause of the oblique movement of the air from the poles to the equator, he will find little difficulty in picturing to himself how the waters of this great equatorial current, moving towards the poles at the rate of three thousand miles a month, would behave when turned to the right and left by an equatorial barrier such as South America now interposes against their course. Their constant passage to regions having greater movement by virtue of the earth's rotation led to the deflection of the tradewinds to the west as they came down to the equator; the reverse conditions affect the waters which are turned from the equator towards the poles. They are in this part of their course moving faster than the regions they are continually entering, and as a consequence they move more rapidly than the earth at each successive point at which they find themselves in their journey towards the poles, and so take paths leading to the northeast and to the southeast. The result is that practically no large part of the Atlantic equatorial stream escapes out of

its basin, and each of the several oceans has its circulation kept to itself to a very great extent. When these vast whirlpool currents sweep away from the equator on their stately northward march, they take with them the temperature acquired in several months' exposure to the heat of a tropical sun. Waters which perhaps a year before were at the temperature of melting ice start again for the pole at the temperature of from eighty to eightyfive degrees Fahrenheit, moving in the case of the Gulf Stream with the speed of nearly five miles an hour. The momentum of its impact against the shore which turned it from its course deepens the tide of warm water in the Gulf Stream to a thousand feet or more; but generally these streams of warm water become shallower at each stage of their progress to the north, until they are but a few hundred feet deep. Although the streams lose a good deal of their heat on their road towards the pole, they still retain enough at their crossing of the arctic circle to make them inconceivably powerful in their effect on the temperature of the high northern regions. Mr. James Croll, in his admirable studies on this subject, has clearly shown that the Gulf Stream, or the Atlantic whirlpool, carries nearly as much heat into the arctic circle as is cast into that region by the rays of the sun. As shown by that distinguished physicist, the difference of the mean temperature of the equator and poles, now only eighty degrees Fahrenheit, would be as much as two hundred degrees Fahrenheit were there no ocean streams; the equator would then have a temperature of one hundred and thirty-five degrees above, and the poles eighty degrees below zero, the equator being fifty-five degrees warmer than at present, the poles eighty-three degrees colder. To annihilate the ocean currents would be to extinguish the organic life over a considerable district beneath the equator, and in all the territory beyond about forty-five degrees of latitude. The atmospheric contention which would arise from this wide difference between the poles and the equator would make the small part of the earth where organic

life could find a foot-hold a perfect battle-ground of the elements; so that even in the strip of twenty or thirty degrees of width where the temperature conditions would seem to permit life, it is questionable whether any considerable development of this life would be possible.

When we have once come to see that not only are the ocean currents powerful instruments of climatic correction, but that the very existence of organic life depends on their work, we are willing to look to the accidents of their course for the causes of great climatic changes. It is easily seen that if by geographical changes these ocean currents were excluded from their ancient tracts, or admitted to new fields, the world's climate could be greatly bettered. If, for example, the relatively shallow water between Iceland and Scandinavia were to be changed to dry land, so as to shut out the Gulf Stream from the Arctic Ocean, there is not the smallest doubt that the climate of Europe would suffer somewhat the same change as has come of late to North America. In place of a rather mild northern sea, the waters which lave the arctic shores of that continent and Northern Asia would be visited by an even deeper cold than now makes desolate the shores of the northernmost lands of our own continent, while Southern and Western Europe would receive more heat and moisture than now fall to their lot. If the reader will take a globe or a good world-map in hand, he will see that our greater and more easily conceived climatal variations can occur through very simple geographical modifications. He will see that while the arctic circle is wide open to the Atlantic, the Pacific shores draw close their lines in the north, giving but a narrow and a shallow strait to unite the Arctic and the Pacific waters. He will see that the Pacific gulf stream, the Kuru Sivo of the Japanese, possessing a current probably much greater in power than our Atlantic Gulf Stream, sweeps off the coast of Asia, and pours its waters into the great bay formed by the converging shores of Asia and America. Into this bay and along its shores the heat is discharged in great volume,

but much of it finds its way back into tropical waters, unexpended. Perhaps not a hundredth part of it drifts through the difficult passage of Behring Strait into the polar sea. Yet even this slender thread of tropical water keeps a somewhat open sea in this section in the depth of the sunless winter. If the vast lowlying districts of Eastern Siberia and Western Alaska were sunk beneath the sea, even to the depth of a few hundred feet, a trifling change in the great mechanism of the continents, it would open wide the road of this vast ocean stream straightway to the pole. The immedi iate result of this change is in good part told us by the effects of the Atlantic Gulf Stream. The temperature of the interarctic region is now lifted at least as much as thirty degrees by the action of the Gulf Stream. An equal effect would be exercised by the Japanese current when the great gates were thrown wide open by the recurring geological changes. Thirty degrees is the least rise in the annual temperature of the region about the pole that would come from the action of this great Japanese current if it could make its way to the north as freely as does the Gulf Stream. Whenever the Alaskan gates to the pole are unbarred, the whole of the ice-cap of the circumpolar regions must at once melt away; all the plants of the northern continents, now kept in narrow bounds by the arctic cold, would begin their march towards the pole. The plants of the Ohio Valley would soon come again on to the Greenland shores. The Gulf Stream and the Pacific stream would bring not only their life-sustaining heat, but at the same time a great store of the seeds of the plants which would be candidates for the new places in the awakened lands. The Gulf Stream is every day taking a great quantity of seeds to the northern shores of Europe and America; trees stuck full of acorns and nuts by the busy woodpeckers and other seed-garnering animals are carried by the winter storms into the great rivers, and by them earried on into the Gulf of Mexico; in time they are borne, along with other seeds of plants, in great plenty, even as far as