The summer in Great Britain had been noticeably colder, and with the passage of the autumnal equinox, the winds increased in strength, and brought with them a terrifying cold. All records were broken, and the sinking thermometers withdrawing their silver threads into the diminutive bulbs, became suddenly the chief subjects of conversation. The corridor of the Houses of Parliament, the state room of Windsor, the clubs of Pall Mall and the parlors of the West End, no less than the alcoves of London Bridge, the shops in White Friars, or the auction stalls of the Ghetto, buzzed with the endless comparison of observations made on these hitherto unnoticed instruments of precision, and their slightest variations took precedence in the daily prints, over the aphorisms of the prime minister or the nullities of the king. An enormously increased sale of thermometers accompanied the sinister records of the deepening cold; importations of them from the United States spread an unprecedented wonder throughout the world as to the meaning of this change in climate, and the range of temperature, as the season advanced, was as much an object of solicitude as the growing expenditures of London, and more talked about than the fancied rupture between Spain and France. Meteorological journals were besieged with subscribers; Abbe, Loomis, Ferrel were as much in demand at the book stores as Glaisher or Thomson; Flammarion was as popular as Tyndal, and the lectures delivered at the British Museum had such suffocating success that the Red Cross Societies of London conceived the idea of public instructions for a tuppenny, to replenish their forgotten treasuries. The pedestrian and the chance acquaintance of the tramway would interview each other on the prevalent topic of alarm, and quote Wells, and Boussingault, and Daniel, and Quetelet, Forbes, Helmersen, Kamtz and Kupffer with more unction and accuracy than he did the current prices of wool or barley.