After cutting their way out, to the Lothian Road, the explorers began investigations and were horror stricken to find that immense conflagration had broken out, destroying great sections of the city, which owed its partial survival to the masses of invading snow. These fires had started in the houses occupied by the domestic bandits, who had seized the finest residences, provisioned them from the stores, and surrendered themselves to an orgy of rapine and indulgence, by which their own fears were stifled, through the excesses of their drunken dissipation. Hundreds of these unfortunates had perished in the flames, their recklessness had invoked. The picture of the noble and beautiful city was shocking. The fires had made inroads upon the attractive Princes street, and in the portions west of the Caledonian station, towards the Donaldson hospital, gaping openings and swept acres revealed the unchecked fury of the flames. While it was probable that the city might, with a return of auspicious conditions resume some of its old beauty it was also too plain that the veto of Nature had been indelibly written across all such plans. Glaciers had already begun their formation in the Highlands, and the incipient development of an Ice Age was forcibly proclaimed on every hand. The logic of events was unanswerable. The United Kingdom throughout all its parts must participate again in the benighted life of Labrador and Siberia. And Europe throughout its borders felt the poignant exasperation of the Arctic goad. It trembled with a new apprehension. The touch of those icy fingers, stretched out in myriad lines of approach, swarming like wavering steel points in thick onslaught from the crowded skies, made it suddenly anxious. It corrected its habits, it took council of piety and played with beseeching care its pretty role of devotee. Its ridiculous and wicked society, with futile haste filled the churches, and tried to forget its inherited cruelty, and even turned with an unexpected solicitude to the consideration of improving, in some sure way, the state of the untitled majority. Its scientific men rushed into congresses and explored their text books, and read and reread hopeless papers on the _why_ and _how_ of it, but being unable to invent another Gulf Stream, retired into dismal prognostications of a returning Ice Age. In fact deluded, as scientific men often are, by language, they embraced the thought of a “returning Ice Cap,” which would successfully force its way from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. They nervously began measurements of the Alpine glaciers, took temperatures, wandered up in the higher regions of the atmosphere in balloons, sounded the floor of the ocean, established meteorological stations everywhere, and became so excited and convinced that they were happily on hand at a critical geological juncture, that they succeeded in supplying a technical ground for panic.