THE FALL OF THE YEAR. 225 



amid the universal chilling of an exhausted 

 world. Luckily for us, however — or unluckily 

 if the pessimists will have it so — the winter 

 has not so far really set in, and we are as yet 

 only at the premonitory stage of full autumn. 

 The time is still recent, as astronomers and 

 geologists reckon distance or nearness, when 

 the Poles were warm enough to support a 

 thoroughly tropical type of life. Trees dis- 

 tantly like those of Java and Brazil, animals 

 faintly suggesting those of Central Africa and 

 the Malay Archipelago, then formed the 

 fauna and flora of the extreme north. But 

 just as the Poles had been the earliest part to 

 cool from incandescence into a firm crust, so, 

 when worse times came, they were the earliest 

 part to cool from tropical heat to what we 

 European human beings complacently de- 

 scribe as temperate, and from temperate again 

 to arctic. And as life had first developed at 

 the North Pole, thence to spread southward, 

 so now the new types of life, adapted to the 

 altered conditions^ were each first evolved at 



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