would have been suitable to the occasion; and without being unduly precise, or emphatic, or otherwise theatrical, the Emperor could scarcely have declared in fewer words than he employed that, unable to find death, he accepted captivity. As a proof of the tendency of things to go wrong, even when deviation from the right course would seem next to impossible, it may be mentioned that at least four different versions of the Emperor Napoleon's letter have been published. In some he lays his sword at the feet, in others, places it in the hands of the Prussian king. In a manuscript copy circulated the night of the battle, not many hours after the receipt of the original, the writer made the Emperor declare himself incapable of dying at the head of his troops. N'ayant pas su mourir," instead of "n'ayant pas pu mourir," it began; and probably this edition, presenting at least one notable variation from the genuine text, found its way, like so many others, into print.

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The Emperor William received and left behind him at Versailles, a number of letters, more or less anonymous, in which he was taunted with having continued the war after the capture of the man against whom alone he pretended to have undertaken it. On the margin of one of these epistles, in which he was addressed familiarly in English as "Old Rascal!" the Emperor had written, "Je n'ai jamais dit cela;" and his Majesty's chief minister has repeatedly found it necessary to meet similarly unfounded accusations with a similar reply.

If proclamations and letters are falsified in time of war, and falsified so rapidly that incorrect copies get into circulation before the ink of the original document has had time to dry, speeches, sayings, and utterances of all kinds are liable to the same fate in time of peace. In France, and not in France alone, nothing is more generally believed of Prince Bismarck than that he once, in the Prussian Chamber, declared the superiority, or rather the priority, of "might to "right":"Macht vor Recht," or, as the French put it, "La force prime le droit." Times out of number, Prince Bismarck has written to deny that he ever uttered what in one sense would be a mere truism (since every right is pre

ceded by and based on some kind of force), in another a simple barbarism; until at last the very frequency of his contradictions, and the necessity, constantly renewed, of having to make them, has been used as an argument against him. The terrible "blood and iron through which alone a nation can gain its rights, is known to be an expression borrowed from a German poet, in whose verse it means neither more nor less than

"Who would be free, himself must strike the blow,"

in O'Connell's favorite couplet.

The saying, attributed to M. Thiers, about the advantages of the Republican form of government in France as "the one which divides us the least," had not, when it was first pronounced, the meaning given to it now. M. Thiers, as a Royalist, made the remark, since turned against the monarchical party; and what he said was: "The Republic is the form of government which divides us (the Royalists) the least, and which disunites them (the Republicans) the most." In other words, Monarchists of all kinds will combine against a Republic; but, a Republic once declared, Republicans will quarrel among themselves." At present the first half of M Thiers's epigram is alone quoted; and, true or false, the pointless phrase, as now interpreted, suits the existing situation.

No man of true wit, when a good thing has been given to him, or has even been taken possession of by himself, likes to be afterwards deprived of it for the benefit of the rightful owner. Thus when Mr. Disraeli's eulogium on the Duke of Wellington, including his essay on the character of a general, was shown to M. Thiers, that eminent statesman at once protested that it must be his: "Ca doit être de moi," he exclaimed; though it afterwards turned out to be Armand Carrel's.

Lord Beaconsfield is the author of innumerable phrases which have made. their mark. The writer, however, of a very interesting article in a recent number of Fraser's Magazine has shown that Mr. Disraeli sometimes "prenait son bien," like Molière, v herever he chanced to find it. When Mr. Disraeli called our street cab "the gondola of London," he

Or the many facts in physical geography which modern study has brought to light, none, perhaps, is more startling than the certainty that, in former ages, the climate of the earth has been very different from what it now is. Our forefathers had so accustomed themselves to the idea that the present is the natural order of things, that heat and cold are the essential and necessary characteristics of the tropical and arctic zones, that they received with incredulity the announcements of geological discoveries which seemed to speak of widely different conditions; and maintained that the remains of tropical beasts or plants found, as in our country, st have been carried there in some convulsion or cataclysm, probably by the great deluge itself.

This state of doubt, incredulity, and unbelief has long since passed away, and it is now well known, not only by professed students of geology and geography, but by the general reader, that from the earliest ages the climate, as well as the surface of the earth, has been subject to continual change. The knowledge, however, is a living reality to but few. The fossils of the coal-fields have indeed long accustomed the public to the idea of a period of great warmth, an idea accepted the more readily as in apparent unison with the received belief in the once molten state of the globe, which was thus supposed to have been still cooling down to its present temperature within comparatively recent times; but the idea of frequent alternations, of periods of great cold succeeding or preceding periods of great warmth, is one of which indeed many may have read or heard, but without, by any means, fully grasping the meaning of it.

In fact, the old notion, as formulated

(1.) The Great Ice Age, and its Relation to the Antiquity of Man. By JAMES GEIKIE, F.R.S.E., F.G.S., of Her Majesty's Geological Survey of

Scotland. 8vo. London. 1874.

(2.) Climate and Time in their Geological Relations: a Theory of Secular Changes of the

Earth's Climate. By JAMES CROLL, of Her Majesty's Geological Survey of Scotland. 8vo. London. 1875.

by Sir David Brewster, that temperature, and climate as depending on temperature, is a simple function of the latitude, has stood very much in the way, and has rendered it difficult for any more exact statement to win belief; so that even now the great difference between the climates of places on the same parallel, such as Labrador and England, is an every-day source of wonder and vague guessing. But the experience of modern geographers has shown that such irregularities are the rule, and the labors of geologists have proved that, in past ages, climate has varied and alternated in almost every possible way, from the poles to the equator. The geological record is in many places obscure, in many places altogether obliterated; but enough remains to establish the general truth of the proposition, and to propound it as a physical problem of no less interest than difficulty.

It is the interpretation of this record, the investigation of this problem, that the authors of the two works which we have named above have attempted. They have done so in a patient and earnest manner, searching after truth with a zeal that recognizes no hindrance, with a practised skill that luxuriates in difficulties; and they have given us books of an interest more thrilling than the most sensational tale of broken vows or violated commandments which has gone the round of the circulating libraries. Mr. Geikie's book, indeed, is principally historical or descriptive, and is eminently readable and intensely exciting; but Mr. Croll's will scarcely meet with such popular acceptance, for though its interest is, if possible, even greater than that of the other, it bristles with facts, and arguments, and stern arithmetic, which will delight the earnest student, but will be as a quickset hedge. from which the mere casual reader will turn in dismay. For such, the book does not profess to be written; and whilst we would call special attention to it, as well as to its fellow, as both requiring and deserving a careful examination, we think we shall be doing the world of letters good service in presenting to it

some account of the subject-matter of these very remarkable works, whose publication may be said to mark a scientific epoch.

We would not, of course, be understood to imply that the phenomena treated of in these works are now for the first time described and discussed. So far from this being the case, the outline of the facts has been before the public for more than thirty years, and their interpretation has been investigated by most of the leading geologists of Europe and America, and more particularly in our own country by Lyell, Ramsay, and Archibald Geikie, the elder brother of one of our present authors. But in the writings of all these, the subject of climate has been more or less subsidiary to some other principal design, an incidental episode or illustration in the body of some more general essay, and its details have not been worked out in a comprehensive and collected manner. In this sense 'The Great Ice Age' and 'Climate and Time' form the first complete exposition of these phenomena and their correlative theories, and have thus a distinct value, irrespective of the skilled labor and scientific acumen which have been brought to bear on the complex problems under consideration.

When the early dispute between the rival claims of fire and water began to die out, and the less sensational theory of Sir Charles Lyell made its way, geologists perceived that there were many facts which neither fire nor water, nor any other familiar agency, could explain; such, for instance, as huge angular boulders found many hundreds of miles from the place of their origin; heaps of rough stones or of dirt piled up or scattered about in situations where water could not have carried them; fixed rocks, smoothed, rounded, polished, and regularly scratched; or vast quantities of finely-ground and well-kneaded but unstratified clay intimately mixed up with stones scratched and polished as the rocks. And yet these appearances, common over the whole of Northern Europe and America, are peculiarly so in our own country: the clay, especially, is a distinct geological feature of a great part of the Scottish lowlands, where it is known as 'till,' and of England, where it has been more commonly called

'boulder clay;' but its characteristics are everywhere the same; it is a firm, tough, tenacious, stony clay, more objectionable to engineers than the hardest rocks. These phenomena were the subject of much debate: it was only by slow degrees that the prejudices of habit and of former modes of thought could be overcome, and it became recognized that ice was the one and only agent in nature which could give rise to them.

Long observation in Switzerland, where glaciers still exist, showed that the grinding and kneading of the clay is even now going on; that rocks are even now being smoothed, rounded, polished, and scratched; that irregular heaps of stones are being piled up as lateral or terminal moraines; and that enormous boulders are being carried far from their parent cliff.

More exact observation showed that the glaciers of modern Switzerland are mere pigmies in comparison with those which must have existed long ago, and pointed out the moraines of the past, identical in fashion with those of the present, the rounded and scratched rocks, the transported boulders, and all the other marks which the modern glaciers could be seen duly registering. Here then was the key: the marks in England, in Scotland, in Denmark, in Norway or Sweden, were identical with those found in Switzerland, and there clearly recognized as made by an extended system of glaciers. But it was difficult to believe that glaciers of a size at all adequate to produce the observed. effects could ever have existed in this temperate and low-lying part of Europe; and even to those who were prepared to admit the effect of glacier action, there were many apparent contradictions which seemed to render the proposed theory untenable. Still, the enormous power of ice, both to carry and to grind, was generally admitted; and it was eagerly and positively maintained that the particular form of ice which had, in past ages, been at work in this part of the globe, was that of bergs borne on an arctic current.

This did not seem to involve any extreme change of climate. It was well known that on the other side of the Atlantic, bergs of an enormous size annually come down to a much lower latitude than ours, and that in the south they approach very near to the Cape of Good