f the Pacific."

"That is true," remarked Pencroft, "and when I have been serving on
board whalers I have seen icebergs off Cape Horn."

"The severe cold experienced in Lincoln Island," said Gideon Spilett,
"may then perhaps be explained by the presence of floes or icebergs
comparatively near to Lincoln Island."

"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 t