APPLICA TION OF FOREGOING CHAPTERS. 57 



are commonly knowing and capable. In the case of 

 inability to breathe, the punishment is corporal, breath- 

 ing being a matter of fashion, so old and long settled 

 that nature can admit of no departure from the esta- 

 blished custom, and the procedure in case of failure 

 is as much formulated as the fashion itself. In the 

 case of the circulation, the whole performance has 

 become one so utterly of rote, that the mere discovery 

 that we could do it at all was considered one of the 

 highest flights of human genius. 



It has been said a day will come when the Polar 

 ice shall have accumulated, till it forms vast continents 

 many thousands of feet above the level of the sea, all of 

 solid ice. The weight of this mass will, it is believed, 

 cause the world to topple over on its axis, so that the 

 earth will be upset as an ant-heap overturned by 

 a ploughshare. In that day the icebergs will come 

 crunching against our proudest cities, razing them from 

 off the face of the earth as though they were made 

 of rotten blotting-paper. There is no respect now of 

 Handel nor of Shakespeare; the works of Rembrandt 

 and Bellini fossilise at the bottom of the sea. Grace, 

 beauty, and wit, all that is precious in music, literature, 

 and art — all gone. In the morning there was Europe. 

 In the evening there are no more populous cities nor 

 busy hum of men, but a sea of jagged ice, a lurid sun- 

 set, and the doom of many ages. Then shall a scared 

 remnant escape in places, and settle upon the changed 

 continent when the waters have subsided — a simple 

 people, busy hunting shellfish on the drying ocean 

 beds, and with little time for introspection ; yet they 



