Owing to this very simple but very wonderful provision of divine power and wisdom, this earth enjoys the relief of the changes in the seasons, as well as the variations in the length of the days. For one half of the year, or from equinox to equinox, from the time when the globe is at a due-west point of the table until it reaches the east, the north pole would always receive the light, in a circle around it, that would gradually increase and diminish; and for the other half, the same would be true of the other hemisphere. Of course there is a precise point on the earth where this polar illumination ceases. The shape of the illuminated part is circular; and placing the point of a pencil on the globe at the extremest spot on the circle, holding it there while the globe is turned on its axis, the lines made would just include the portions of the earth around the globe that thus receives the rays of the sun at midsummer. These lines compose what are termed the arctic and antarctic circles, with the last of which our legend has now a most serious connection. After all, we are by no means certain that we have made our meaning as obvious as we could wish, it being very difficult to explain phenomena of this nature clearly, without actually experimenting. It is usual to say that there are six months day and six months night in the polar basins. This is true, literally, at the poles only; but, approximatively, it is true as a whole. We apprehend that few persons--none, perhaps, but those who are in habits of study--form correct notions of the extent of what may be termed the icy seas. As the polar circles are in 23° 28", a line drawn through the south pole, for instance, commencing on one side of the earth at the antarctic circle, and extending to the other, would traverse a distance materially exceeding that between New York and Lisbon. This would make those frozen regions cover a portion of this globe that is almost as large as the whole of the Atlantic Ocean, as far south as the equator. Any one can imagine what must be the influence of frost over so vast a surface, in reproducing itself, since the presence of ice-bergs is thought to affect our climate, when many of them drift far south in summer. As power produces power, riches wealth, so does cold produce cold. Fill, then, in a certain degree, a space as large as the North Atlantic Ocean with ice in all its varieties, fixed, mountain and field, berg and floe, and one may get a tolerably accurate notion of the severity of its winters, when the sun is scarce seen above the horizon at all, and then only to shed its rays so obliquely as to be little better than a chill-looking orb of light, placed in the heavens simply to divide the day from the night.