After the geographical revolution above assumed, the climate of equinoctial lands might be brought at last to resemble that of the present temperate zone, or perhaps be far more wintry. They who should then inhabit such small isles and coral reefs as are now seen in the Indian Ocean and South Pacific, would wonder that zoophytes of large dimensions had once been so prolific in their seas; or if, perchance, they found the wood and fruit of the cocoa-nut tree or the palm silicified by the waters of some ancient mineral spring, or incrusted with calcareous matter, they would muse on the revolutions which had annihilated such genera, and replaced them by the oak, the chestnut, and the pine. With equal admiration would they compare the skeletons of their small lizards with the bones of fossil alligators and crocodiles more than twenty feet in length, which, at a former epoch, had multiplied between the tropics: and when they saw a pine included in an iceberg, drifted from latitudes which we now call temperate, they would be astonished at the proof thus afforded, that forests had once grown where nothing could be seen in their own times but a wilderness of snow. If the reader hesitate to suppose so extensive an alteration of temperature as the probable consequence of geographical changes, confined to one hemisphere, he should remember how great are the local anomalies in climate now resulting from the peculiar distribution of land and sea in certain regions. Thus, in the island of South Georgia, before mentioned (p. 98), Captain Cook found the everlasting snows descending to the level of the sea, between lat. 54° and 55° S.; no trees or shrubs were to be seen, and in summer a few rocks only, after a partial melting of the ice and snow, were scantily covered with moss and tufts of grass. If such a climate can now exist at the level of the sea in a latitude corresponding to that of Yorkshire in spite of all those equalizing causes before enumerated, by which the mixture of the temperatures of distant regions is facilitated throughout the globe, what rigors might we not anticipate in a winter generated by the transfer of the mountains of India to our arctic circle!