Old Father Science may be said to be a Santa Claus who keeps a curiosity-shop. His pack is not only full of curious things but he is always "springing surprises on us," as our High School Boy puts it. For example, one of the most curious as well as picturesque evidences that great stretches of land sink under the sea from time to time is furnished by the English swallows. Like many other wealthy people, they spend their winters in Algiers, and they find their way over the Mediterranean, not by any lands they can see between coast and coast--for there _are_ none--but by lands that _used_ to be there, thousands upon thousands of years ago. But how do the swallows know? They don't. Is it instinct? No. (Whatever instinct is!) Then why do they do it? Look it up and you'll see.[6] Yes, and you'll see that we have habits that _we_ get in the same way; our habits of bowing, for example, because it's the custom, although few people know how it originated. [Footnote 6: "Colin Clout's Calendar," by Grant Allen.] CHAPTER II (FEBRUARY) Up rose the wild old Winter King And shook his beard of snow; "I hear the first young harebell ring, 'Tis time for me to go! Northward o'er the icy rocks, Northward o'er the Sea." --_Leland._ THE WINTER THAT LASTED ALL SUMMER It's been just one thing after another with the world and me ever since we were born. First it was the fire, then it was the flood, and then it was the winter that lasted all summer. Just what started it nobody knows to this day. Some of the theories have been that this particular winter stayed so long because the earth wavered on its axis, or that it flew the track for a while and got too far away from the sun. From our present knowledge of the machinery of the heavens it is certain that the earth's motions could not vary to this extent. One theory that appeals to many scientists to-day is that when so much of the carbon in the air went into the making of our coal beds the earth became unusually cold, and so snows of each successive winter kept piling up instead of melting away during the spring and summer. When there is plenty of this gas in the air the earth's heat does not escape so fast. But with the great amount of carbon taken up in the growth of the vast forests that were made into coal, Mother Earth's air blanket grew thinner, so to speak, hence the long, cold spell. [Illustration: _From Norton's "Elements of Geology." By permission of Ginn and Company_ WHEN THE ICE SHEETS COVERED THE LAND]