“Your opinion is very admissible indeed, my dear Spilett,” answered Cyrus Harding, “and it is evidently to the proximity of icebergs that we owe our rigorous winters.  I would draw your attention also to an entirely physical cause, which renders the Southern colder than the Northern Hemisphere.  In fact, since the sun is nearer to this hemisphere during the summer, it is necessarily more distant during the winter.  This explains then the excess of temperature in the two seasons, for, if we find the winters very cold in Lincoln Island, we must not forget that the summers here, on the contrary, are very hot.”

“But why, if you please, captain,” asked Pencroft, knitting his brows, “why should our hemisphere, as you say, be so badly divided?  It isn’t just, that!”

“Friend Pencroft,” answered the engineer, laughing, “whether just or not, we must submit to it, and here lies the reason for this peculiarity.  The earth does not describe a circle around the sun, but an ellipse, as it must by the laws of rational mechanics.  Now, the earth occupies one of the foci of the ellipse, and so at one point in its course is at its apogee, that is, at its farthest from the sun, and at another point it is at its perigee, or nearest to the sun.  Now it happens that it is during the winter of the southern countries that it is at its most distant point from the sun, and consequently, in a situation for those regions to feel the greatest cold.  Nothing can be done to prevent that, and men, Pencroft, however learned they may be, can never change anything of the cosmographical order established by God Himself.”

“And yet,” added Pencroft, “the world is very learned. what a big book, captain, might be made with all that is known!”

“And what a much bigger book still with all that is not known!” answered Harding.

At last, for one reason or another, the month of June brought the cold with its accustomed intensity, and the settlers were often confined to Granite House.  Ah! how wearisome this imprisonment was to them, and more particularly to Gideon Spilett.

“Look here,” said he to Neb one day, “I would give you by notarial deed all the estates which will come to me some day, if you were a good enough fellow to go, no matter where, and subscribe to some newspaper for me!  Decidedly the thing that is most essential to my happiness is the knowing every morning what has happened the day before in other places than this!”

Neb began to laugh.

“’Pon my word,” he replied, “the only thing I think about is my daily work!”

The truth was that indoors as well as out there was no want of work.