I close these anecdotes, as I began them, by repeating that animals communicate their impressions, and the feelings that move them, by various modulations of their inarticulate cries, which are incomprehensible to us unless we have succeeded by attentive observation in connecting them with the acts that follow or precede them.  We have also seen that the articulation of a few words learned by parrots aids us greatly in learning the meaning of these different inflections.

The extension of these studies would furnish much of interest; but further observations should be made upon the same animals for a longtime continuously, relating especially to their peculiar instincts as manifested by their various cries.  We might then, by comparing and relating acts and cries, reach the point of comprehending and perhaps fixing the meaning in many cases where we are now in ignorance.  Every one has noticed a few facts, and has interpreted and related them, but much is still wanting for the co-ordination of them in the point of view of the signification of the language and communication of animals among themselves.  It has not been made in a general sense. —­Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.

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MODIFICATION OF OUR CLIMATE.

By Joseph Wallace.

Every now and then some weather sage predicts extremely cold winters, and another ventures to say that the sun is gradually losing heat and in time Arctic cold will prevail over the globe.  Whatever may have been the changes during the vast cycles of time prior to the advent of man, or whatever may be the changes in the time to come, one thing is quite certain; that our climate has been much modified within the past two or three thousand years.

“There have been fifteen climatic changes since the beginning of the glacial age, each change lasting 10,500 years, and each change reversing the season in the two hemispheres, the pole which had enjoyed continuous summer being doomed to undergo perpetual winter for 10,500 years, and then passing to its former state for an equal term.  The physical changes upon the earth’s surface during the past 80,000 years modified the changes of climate even in the Arctic regions, so that the intense cold of the former epochs was much modified during the latter epochs.”  Reckoning these climatic changes in their order, we had entered the epoch of a more genial temperature about fifteen hundred years ago; and if no disturbing change takes place during the present epoch, we may reasonably expect a gradual modification of our winters for nine thousand years to come.  The changes to intense cold from perpetual summer during the greater part of the glacial period are supposed to have been caused by the high temperature of the north pole as compared to that of the south pole, owing to the distribution of land around the two, the south having almost none.  Dr. Croll thinks it was caused by the varying inclination of the earth’s axis, which produced the relative position of the two poles toward the sun to be periodically reversed at distant periods.  Dr. James Geikie agrees with Croll on the reverse of seasons every 10,500 years during certain periods of high ellipticity of the earth’s orbit.