The Pulse of Asia : vol.1 / 452 ページ（カラー画像）

0452	The Pulse of Asia : vol.1
アジアの鼓動 : vol.1

0452

The Pulse of Asia : vol.1

アジアの鼓動 : vol.1

he painted only the truth. So careful an author as Gibbon
believes that the climate of Europe has changed since the
days of the first Roman emperors.

In the first chapter of the "Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire" he says: —

"Some ingenious writers have suspected that Europe was
much colder formerly than it is at present; and the most
ancient descriptions of the climate of Germany tend ex-
ceedingly to confirm their theory. The general complaints
of intense frost, and eternal winter, are perhaps little to
be regarded, since we have no method of reducing to the
accurate standard of the thermometer, the feelings or the
expressions of an orator, born in the happier regions of
Greece or Asia. But I shall select two remarkable circum-
stances of a less equivocal nature. 1. The great rivers which
covered the Roman provinces, the Rhine and the Danube,
were frequently frozen over, and capable of supporting the
most enormous weights. The barbarians, who often chose
that severe season for their inroads, transported without
apprehension or danger, their numerous armies, their cav-
alry, and their heavy wagons, over a vast and solid bridge
of ice. Modern ages have not presented an instance of
a like phenomenon. 2. The reindeer, that useful animal,
from which the savage of the north derives the best com-
forts of his dreary life, is of a constitution that supports
and even requires the most intense cold. He is found on
the rock of Spitzberg, within ten degrees of the pole; he
seems to delight in the snows of Lapland and Siberia; but
at present he cannot subsist, much less multiply, in any
country to the south of the Baltic. In the time of Cæsar,

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