“It seems to me,” rejoined Leacraft, “that they tell us nothing of the sort. It is a mild madness to misconstrue them so completely. These extremes of temperatures are far lower than any we have observed, and yet we have been expelled from Scotland. It is the snow. These endless heaping torrents from the skies that have driven us out, and they--I do believe it--will continue; but it has no parallel. Nothing warned us of this--and as to our climatic safety, it was as fixed as the change of day to night when, without warning, without precedent, a bridge of mountains tumbles into a hole in the sea, another bridge rises as a dam, and either occurrence seemed about as likely as that the moon would fall into the sun. I think indeed the advantage of a guess might have lain with the latter supposition.” “Well. The snow; you say it will continue,” said Sir John with a sudden reflex action of revolt. “Why will it continue?” “I estimate the probability for that in this way,” answered Leacraft. “The atmosphere is a system of balances never at rest, unless in equilibrium, and never in equilibrium except at rare intervals, and then in limited and favored spots. This state of inequilibrium causes constant motion, currents, storms, winds and precipitation, whether of rain or snow, depending on temperature and position. Now the motor power of the movement in all this atmospheric mass is difference of temperature, the hot air rising and flowing to the poles, and the cold air of the poles descending and flowing to the equator. That is the A. B. C. of meteorological physics. But the revolution of the earth causes the cold polar winds to blow from the northeast and the warm equatorial winds to blow from the southwest, that is with reference to our position in the northern hemisphere. Now if we are undergoing a progressive refrigeration, the contrast in temperatures between our latitude and the temperature of the equator increases, and because of that, the velocity of the wind blowing from the latter increases too, and the moisture that these winds would have dropped over the equatorial zones is carried further north, and our annual precipitation is thereby increased--our snow falls become more continuous and thicker. Think what the removal of the Gulf Stream means. Croll has clearly shown that the heat bearing capacity of the Gulf Stream is enormous. It seems incredible. I recall some of his statements. He says that the Gulf Stream conveys as much heat as is received from the sun by over one million and a half square miles at the equator, and the amount thus conveyed is equal to all the heat which falls upon the globe within thirty-two miles on each side of the equator; further that the quantity of heat conveyed by the Gulf Stream in one year is equal to the heat which falls, on an average, on three millions and a half square miles of the arctic regions, and that there is actually therefore nearly one-half as much heat transferred from tropical