Virgil and Ovid insist on the severity of cold in the regions of the Danube.  The first describes the inhabitants of these miserable countries withdrawing themselves into caves dressed with the skins of wild beasts.  Ovid, who had passed several years of his life in that region, is more precise in his description.  He says the wine has changed itself here (Black Sea) into a solid frozen mass; one gives it to drink by pieces.  Fearing of being accused of poetic exaggeration he appeals to the testimony of two ancient governors of Moesia, who could establish the facts like himself.  The author who would give such accounts of the Black Sea in our days would risk his reputation for veracity.

Italy, too, experienced its part of the cold in early days.  Virgil tells us of the snows being, heaped up, rivers which carried ice along, the sad winter which split the stone and bound up the course of large streams, and all this in the warmest part of Italy, at the base of the walls of Taranto.  Heratius affirms that the Soracte, a neighboring mountain of Rome, was whitened with thick snow, rivers frozen, and the country covered with snow.  To-day the snow stays very little upon the Soracte and never in the country around Rome.  During the four or five centuries which followed, writers speak of the severity of climate in Northern Italy, the lagoons on the Adriatic being frozen over.  Algiers was much colder then than now.  The Danube, Rhine, and other rivers in Europe, the Nile in Africa, the Amazon in South America, the Mississippi and Missouri in North America, had quite different volumes two thousand years ago than their present actual ones, and they especially rolled much greater masses of water.

There is everything to show a modification of climate in our own days.  If this goes on in the future as in the past, there will be a marked difference in the temperature two or three hundred years from now.  Even a degree in a thousand years would effect a great change in the course of time.  The lowering of four degrees established the ancient extension of glaciers, though it did not interrupt animal or vegetable life.  Fifty-four of the fifty-seven species of Mollusca have outlived the glacial age, and all our savage animals—­even a certain number which have disappeared—­date equally from the quaternary, and were contemporary with the great extension of the glaciers.—­Popular Science News.

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THE ERUPTION OF KRAKATOA.

Before the year 1883 physical geographers, in speaking of the most disastrous volcanic eruption on record, referred first, in point of time, to the celebrated eruption of Vesuvius, in A.D. 79, when the cities of Herculaneum, Pompeii and several smaller towns on the slope of the mountain were destroyed by lava or buried under a mass of pumice stones and ashes; second to that of Hecla and Skaptar Jokull, contiguous mountains