Nor would those appearances be confined to the northern regions; the reign of frost and snow has extended over a wider space in the antarctic than it has in the arctic circle. Mr Murchison quotes from a letter of Captain Harcourt, R. N., who in returning from South America met with a vast number of ice-floes in the Pacific, in latitude 50 degrees. Some of them were not less than two miles square, and 250 to 300 feet above the water, and consequently about 2000 feet thick. It is remarkable that this phenomenon occurred from 85 degrees west longitude, at a considerable distance from any land, to the meridian of Cape Pillar, while the immediate coasts of Chili and Cape Horn offered no trace of them. The winter was comparatively mild, which might indeed account for the liberation of such large masses of ice from the South Pole, and their being wafted into seas usually quite free from them. The number and size of these ice-floes were so astonishing, that Captain Harcourt, during the long winter moonless nights of eighteen hours, had great difficulty in steering through them without shipwreck; their course seemed to be from south-east to north-west, and they were met with through five degrees of latitude (50 to 55 degrees), which would be the exact position of England if transferred to the other hemisphere. May we not then shudder at the thought of that dreary future, in which, by some physical changes of the earth’s surface, according to the theory of Mr Lyell, the conditions of the earth’s superficial temperature may be reversed, and bring down upon the coasts of our ill-fated island those frost-bearing monsters to bite up every living thing by one common congelation; for we may well suppose, that long ere that dismal period our cold-dispelling fuel, turf, coal, and all, will have been utterly consumed. But let us comfort ourselves with this selfish reflection--it will not be in our day.