Arctic regions, and in the hot simoon. The
east wind, which proverbially dries up the skin,
and makes a horse's coat stare, contains its due
proportion of moisture, just as air does after
rain; in fact, almost immediately after parting
with its water, the temperature of the
atmosphere rises, and a part of the water is reabsorbed.
But the air is not merely modified by
the water in it; it is greatly influenced by that
beneath it. Thus, while the shores of Labrador
lie buried in ice and fog, the coasts of England
and Ireland, in the same latitude under the
vitalising warmth of the Gulf stream, smile in
perennial verdure.

Even congealed into ice, water is of such incalculable
service, that without it the machinery
of the globe must come to a stand-still. The
mariner who beholds the huge icebergs bearing
down the Atlantic and looming through the palpable
darkness of midnight; or the traveller who
surveys the savage and fantastic desolation of
the Polar realms; may wonder what purpose they
can serve. They are the checks Nature has
placed upon the over-vibration of the pendulum;
they are the flood-gates, the breaking of which
would ensure the destruction of everything that
now inhabits the earth.

If the movement of upheaval now going on at
Cape North, should extend to Spitzbergen and
the lands around the Pole—a trifling process
compared with the great convulsions that must
have repeatedly happened—the accumulation
of ice in these regions would soon render the
north of Europe uninhabitable. Where the
engine-driver now guides with the steady
smoothness of planetary motion the thundering
flight of the locomotive, the icy stream and
snow-swollen cataract would alone meet the eye;
where the ring of the hammer and whirl of the
spindle tell of man's daily toil, would be heard
only the fall of the avalanche and the grinding of
the icebergs. But a few short years, and the
Polar bear and the walrus, the whale and the
penguin, would again be seen in the German
Ocean and St. George's Channel; and the fertile
fields of England would again lie buried beneath
the clay-flood and the glacial drift; and the lowest
hills would be covered with eternal snows.

Or, were it to sink again by the process
which has borne down tracts, equally large, to
the bottom of the ocean, leaving a scarcely appreciable
inequality on the surface of the globe,
man, with all his traditions, arts, and sciences,
would disappear from the scene, and his place
would be filled by some of the huge forms which
tell of a mighty past in language that cannot be
disputed. For a time, indeed, fanned by the
cool breezes from the Atlantic, the temperate
regions might be endurable by those who
can bear the fierceness of a tropical heat.
But ere long, this possibility would cease;
nay, if this not very improbable change happened,
the giant iguanodon might reappear on the
wold, and the fish-lizard again be the sanguinary
tyrant of the ocean and the estuary; again the
pterodactyle might cleave with its dusky wings
the dank and poisonous air of the tree-fern
groves; and the turtle might once more spawn
her eggs "where the walrus now sleeps and the
seal has drifted on the ice-floe."

Had man been able to read and interpret
Nature's signs aright, he might have learned
from the denizens of the ice-fields how to get
through the north-west passage by a very short
cut. Whales, it appears, have got into Behring's
Straits, after escaping harpooning in Baffin's Bay;
in one or two instances a fish harpooned in the
Atlantic has been captured soon afterwards in
the Pacific: so there can be only a short
distance between them, as the whale cannot remain
long under water.

Not merely has water preserved the remains,
and chronicled the era, of the stone lily and
the lizard of the weald, of the cavern bear, and
the old English tiger, but it has been lately made
by man to reveal the doings of men who went
down into the dark coasts of the past, ages ago.
Memphis and Heliopolis, old in the times of
Herodotus, Homer, and Joseph, were selected for
an experiment, aided by the munificence and
energy of the Pasha of Egypt. Ninety-five pits
were sunk on those sites. As the Nile accumulates
almost exactly the same quantity of
mud every year, the explorers were able to
determine that men had lived there, at least
eleven thousand four hundred years ago. And
long before this, there must have been rude tribes
who knew nothing of the potter's art, by remains
of which the diggers were guided.

The results are so interesting, that they deserve
to be given in full. At six feet depth,
they found part of a human figure; and at ten
feet (representing a flight of at least three
thousand years), a fragment of a small figure
of a lion, both in baked clay. There, and
two feet deeper, were found shells of the Nile
and the sea. Pottery was discovered at various
depths, from six to fifteen feet: that down to
fourteen feet (four thousand two hundred years
ago) being white: the rest consisting of coarse
unglazed pots, jars, and saucers. At twelve feet,
was found a small fragment of coloured mosaic;
at thirteen feet, the blade of a knife made of
copper, hardened with arsenic; statuettes were
dug up at depths varying from eight to fifteen
feet, and a tablet of inscriptions was found. As
the excavations were made by intelligent persons,
aware of the object of investigation, but
in no way likely to misrepresent facts, the conclusions
may be considered worthy of all reliance.

Geology has taught us that every rood of land
by the fruits of which man could live, has been
manured at the bottom of the waters; and geography
has shown that continents consist of
so many roods lifted en masse when the due
time came. Thanks to the indomitable energy of
man, we are now, by the aid of Brookes's apparatus,
able to discover how land is fertilised, even
in oceans as deep as the Himalaya mountains are
high. There were no slight difficulties to over-