Mr. C-- stopped; his agitation fairly choked him. Leacraft sympathized with the gentleman’s distress. His bitterness of heart had created a mental hallucination, an unbalanced affectation of epigram. Leacraft interposed: “Well, Sir John, the empire of Great Britain has no reason to regret its existence, even if it is based on a climatic fallacy. There have been some things done in it which no change in temperature will obliterate, unless the Ice Age is returning and we all decline into extinction north and south, and the Earth is again without form and void. You speak of caprices. How can you tell this is not a caprice, too, a monstrous subterfuge of Nature to teach us a lesson, letting us come back again when we are better, when we can feel and keep grateful to Her for letting us live at all. You err in deduction Sir John. A round Earth exposed to the sun’s heat with a zenith movement from 23,28 north latitude to 23,28 south latitude, must exhibit water currents flowing north, and bringing with them equatorial temperatures. Such a fact is as normal as that the same earth must be colder at the poles than at the equator. You are involved in a sophism, because you assume a principle which is imaginary, so far as its invariable truth is concerned. “And what warnings have we ever had?” “Warnings!” said Sir John, after a moment’s silence during which he regarded Leacraft with a guarded hopefulness, “Warnings! Many.” And he took out a note book from which he read. “The winters of 1544, 1608, 1709, were terrific--the thermometer at Paris in 1709, sank to nine degrees below zero Fah. In 1788–1789, the river Seine froze over in November. Then there was 1794–5, 1798–9, when the rivers of Europe were frozen over. In 1795, the mercury in Paris registered ten degrees below zero, although at the same time in London the temperature was nearly seven degrees above zero. And then we have 1812–3 when Napoleon failed, defeated by the cold rather than the Russians. In 1819–20, in 1829–30, in 1840–41, in 1853–4, 1870–71, during the Franco-German war, with the cold greater at the south than in the north of France, and when--this is worth noting--the Gulf Stream was driven backward by a north wind, and banked up, as it were, at Spain and Portugal; in all these years there were intensely cold winters, which if continued, and reinforced by storms, and increased by the disappearance of some of the helpful agencies that now keeps up our supply of caloric, would mean, could only mean our extinction. “Now as for degrees of cold--I quote from Flammarion--‘the greatest cold yet experienced has been twenty-four degrees below zero in France, five degrees below in England, twelve below in Belgium and Holland, sixty-seven degrees in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, forty-six in Russia, thirty-two in Germany, ten degrees below in Spain and Portugal.’ These are Fahrenheit records. These severities tell us our danger.”