On the other hand, if the Gulf stream, continuing to bring warm water, not only crossed the Atlantic, but was enabled, owing to a depression of the plains of Europe and northern Asia beneath the water-level, to pass across to the Pacific, or connect itself with the Mediterranean,— thus isolating Europe,-the temperature of the smaller lands thus left behind would be considerably higher and much more equable, and the climate very much moister; rain would be heavier and more frequent; cloud much more continuous; fog and mist incessant; and wind, perhaps, much less troublesome. In such a climate, as in Norfolk Island in the southern hemisphere, there would be little of the vegetation that we are now familiar with, but a rank and luxuriant growth of ferns and grasses would overrun every thing. Even palms and tree-ferns might well flourish, and all marsh plants would multiply with extreme rapidity.

And all this marvellous alteration would be consistent with a very small increase of annual temperature. The winter would be very much warmer, and the summer a little cooler; the days would rarely be hot, and the nights never cold. Man might and would remain under such circumstances, as he can adapt himself to any climate; but most of the other animal inhabitants would be seriously affected, and many quite destroyed.

If the change were very gradual, some of these might, however, adapt themselves, and many would be replaced by other tribes brought in from a distance; so that no great revolution need take place to bring about a marked revision of the animal and vegetable inhabitants of an eighth part of the land on the globe, provided a moderate amount of alteration of level of the land were to take place within a period of a few centuries, or, at the most, in a few thousand years.

It may seem to the reader unaccustomed to speculations of this kind, that we are assuming physical impossibilities to explain conditions that never did and never will occur. So little is this the case, that changes fully equal to those alluded to may really have taken place since man has been introduced upon the earth. Very much greater, but perfectly conceivable, changes are suggested to the geologist when he begins to study the mode in which the earth's crust has been formed, and explain the phenomena presented to him by every heap of gravel, every quarry of limestone, and every pit of sand.

Changes of climate and changes of the earth's surface are simultaneous, and both have certainly been produced ever since the earth was subjected to those influences of air and water that seem to us essential to its very existence. It is as easy to imagine the air always perfectly still, or the waters of the ocean to continue without a ripple, as it is to suppose that the relative level of land and water has always been the same. If the air moves, the water is disturbed; if the waves beat on the shore, the coast-line is modified; and if the land is altered, the climate is adapted to the change: all these movements being in harmony with each other, and all incessant and inherent in the very nature of things, as presented for human observation.

Climate, then, is interesting not merely in itself, as affecting our feelings and health, but in its relations to the wide and large sciences of physical geography and geology. It may with advantage be studied; for as a mere conversational subject it introduces a variety of matter and a multitude of considerations. It is clear that climate is not a question of latitude and longitude,-that the south is not necessarily warm and the north cold; that east wind does not always bring rheumatism; that the south wind need not be hot, or the south-west be accompanied by rain. It is clear also that the climate that now characterises any given place need not always have prevailed, and that it might at another time have been much colder or much hotter in that place, without any alteration in the position of the earth's axis, without a different quantity of heat having radiated from the sun, and without assuming a state of igneous fluidity of the earth, the internal heat affecting the surface differently at different times, because the crust was thinner or thicker. These theoretical assumptions may have their interest, and may or may not be based on sound evidence; but the mere fact that the climate in the northern hemisphere was once warmer than it is now, is not of itself evidence that ought to be adduced in proof of them. A study of climate, and the causes of climate, will remove many apparent difficulties that are presented to the young geologist, and will give a rational idea to all of conditions that every one ought more or less clearly to understand.

Tried by Court-Martial.

IN a barrack-square, round a little low-arched door, is a miscellany of cabs, Irish jaunting-cars, led horses, loose idlers (chiefly of the unwashed tag-rag order), officers in undress, and a stray soldier in his fullest dress armed with a light cane. The little low-arched door is figured and numbered very conspicuously, like the collar of a policeman's coat, to distinguish it from innumerable other low-arched doors which run round the square, also lettered and figured like a wardrobe of policemen's coats; and it seems to give inconvenient access to a rickety, hollowsounding stair, suggestive of excellent and noisy accommodation for rats and mice. The stray soldier with the cane, interrogated as to the purport of these signs of public interest, gives whatever information he is in possession of; and with an air almost of contempt for what he can only excuse as provincial ignorance, explains that "the" court-martial is "going on ;" that the public are admitted to gratify their curiosity, subject only to conditions of space; and that so many flights of the hollowsounding stairs upwards, and so many turns to the right or left, will lead the inquirer to the exciting scene.

After losing his way about the second landing, and being considerately set right by two orderlies dressed in dirt and a loose déshabille, who are calmly recreating themselves with a very strong tobacco, the inquirer is at last happily embedded in the outer fringe of a composite crowd, into which the leaf of a door projects, like the sharp edge of a knife. On the other side of this knife is comparative ease and comfort; but the probationer struggling forward has to grind his spine painfully against this edge before he can hope to lie secure in a tranquil harbour of repose. This temporary torture being happily passed through, as well as a violent drifting round the bluff headland of a monster soldier, the weary adventurer, much heated with his exertions, gets his garments back into their original position, and, refitting generally, looks upon the scene about him.

The judicial arrangements are primitive, and somewhat of the simplest. The original function of the present court would seem to have been that of a soldier's schoolroom; for there are maps and elementary diagrams, and various rude appeals to the fighting intellect in a low stage of intellectual development. The awe and mystery which wait on the sacred notion of a Bench is awakened by the happy device of a low, long table covered with green baize, at which sit judge and jury in a happy equality. The witness-box is in no determined locality, but with a pleasant indistinctness travels to wherever the witness may be standing. The dock is ingeniously symbolised by a straightened and inconvenient corner, into which, for the service of the prisoner, a small deal table is introduced; while, in defiance of all our accustomed notions and prejudices, two or

three gentlemen in black-darkly hinted at as counsel, but supposed to be strictly invisible to the eye of the court-sit beside the prisoner, and furnish him professional assistance in a mysterious and surreptitious fashion. Judge and jury wear scarlet robes: yet not the scarlet which is edged with ermine, but the scarlet which is bordered with gold and lace. The whole would popularly seem to be a court with equal powers; but in reality the fighting judge, who, from various little decorative tokens, appears to have held briefs in the Crimea and other places, does the work and the talking; the fighting jurymen, who are a little strange and bewildered with their new functions, are restrained to the lighter duties of looking profound when a serious question is started; of shaking their heads with gravity when a hint from the fighting judge has shown them it is safe to do so; and of taking copious and illegible notes of the proceedings. Poor fighting jurymen! Their time was before the evil days of probation by reading and writing, when there was happily no walking barefoot over the hot ploughshares of competitive examination. Poor fighting jurymen! A ball, a flower-show, playing at croquet!-but to turn their poor honest brains loose among the conundrums and pitfalls of sham law!-any thing but this! And yet in one respect this is a more rational court than the legitimate tribunals. The scarlet fighting judge wears no wig or horsehair, and is thus so far irregular, being bereft of the mystic talisman which insures real judicial wisdom. He who wears it becomes the true legal Fortunatus, and the wig is the genuine cap of knowledge.

The Dragoon Captain in the dock has been on his trial for the modest span of some thirty odd days. The issues are, whether the Dragoon Captain has deported himself as an officer and gentleman; terms, as the world well knows, exactly convertible and interchangeable. Through that weary space has this scarlet inquisition been trailing these grave charges, on the track of this conduct "unworthy of an officer and gentleman." In an ordinary court, such delinquency would have been pursued, hunted down, and finally caught, or else discovered to be a pure will-o'-the-wisp, all in some three or four days at furthest. But these scarlet huntsmen, once on the track, have been decoyed aside at very starting by a false scent, and have diligently pursued that for many days; until a second false scent came, and led them away at a zigzag angle for many more days still; when a third, and a fourth, and a fifth false scent, and many succeeding false scents, artfully laid on, and hunted to extinction with infinite diligence, have landed them in a strange country miles away from where they started, and with the original game still to be tracked. They then "try back," and start again fresh and are again led off by successive false scents.

With such pastime as this has the Dublin Court-Martial, recently concluded, been busy. Its legitimate end, to which it should have travelled steadily, was whether the Dragoon Captain had behaved as an officer and gentleman should. Instead, it struck out wildly to the right,

VOL. V.

T

and searched whether Colonel A. had behaved as an officer and gentleman; to the left, to try whether Major B. had behaved as an officer and gentleman; back to the right again, to see whether Captain C. and Ensign D. have respectively conducted themselves as officers and gentlemen. The grounds for Colonel A.'s not being an officer and gentleman arising out of a statement made by Captain E., it is surely allowable that he should be allowed to call Lieutenant F. and Ensign G. to prove that what Captain E. has stated is false; who, in all fairness, should be allowed to call in the testimony of Colonel H. and Major I. to substantiate his statement. So, respectively, Major B., Captain C., Lieutenant D., and Ensign E., would have proved satisfactorily that the prisoner Captain was neither officer nor gentleman, had it not been insinuated on respectable sworn authority that their imaginations had entirely supplied them with these facts, and that therefore it was matter of grave suspicion whether they were officers and gentlemen.

All, however, might have gone well and happily, being confined to mere harmless insinuations of reciprocal perjury, and the whole catalogue of meannesses, but for the ill-omened intrusion about the fifth or sixth day of an instrument of calisthenic discipline known as the Backboard. Henceforth, for an indefinite period, the Dragoon Captain and his delinquencies are abandoned, and the whole court, military chief-justice, military jurymen, witnesses, prosecutor, and all, start in full cry, pellmell, after the-Backboard. With a marvellous industry, every thing is searched out that can possibly throw light on this painful engine of the Graces, for such it may fairly be presumed to be. Every thing gives place to the Backboard. Of a sudden it leaps into a sublime importance, marvellous to those accustomed to deal with such things in their ordinary prosaic field, and mere brute capacity of refining the human person. It has become a sacred, a mysterious, a supernatural instrument. Men are fetched from remote parts of the kingdom to prove-that is, to make contradictory-statements respecting the Backboard. The chief-justice flings away his military suit, and, donning the scarlet of the chase, rides thirty miles to a hunt,-not for the pure earthy purpose of pursuing fox or deer with hounds and horn, but solely on urgent private affairs connected with the Backboard. There is the hardest swearing in the world, all to save the honour of the Backboard. Strange military diaries, with entries in military English, are fearlessly thrust into the light of day,-all to save the reputation of the Backboard. At times its enemies prevail; and being dragged under in the storm, the world thinks it has seen the last of the faithful Backboard, and mourns its loss. But this is only a temporary eclipse; and by and by, in the very thick of some other conflict, and to the great joy of the beholders, is seen to emerge the imperishable Backboard, a glorious resurrection !—fresh, unconquered, and enjoying an eternal youth. Wonderful instrument!

The most delightful portion of the entertainment is the happy mimicry of the various details of a genuine trial, but all carefully distorted and