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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