cte, 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_.

* * * * *

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 in Iceland, in 1783, when two enormous lava
streams, one 15 miles wide and over 100 ft. deep and the other
scarcely inferior, flowed, the first, 50 miles and the other 40, till
they reached the sea, pouring a flood of white hot lava into the
ocean, destroying everything in their paths and killing in the waters
of the ocean the fish, the mainstay of the inhabitants, who were
reduced by the disaster, directly or indirectly, to less than
five-sixths of their former strength; and third to that of Galungung,
in 1822, which devastated such an immense area in Java;