152 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



they are rendered still" more striking in tlie lowering of the 

 streams which move our factories, and still more of the great 

 rivers through which so much of our vast internal commerce is 

 carried on. But, that droughts are in truth, more frequent and 

 severe in any part of our country, at the present day, than a 

 century ago, is a proposition for which wc find no countenance 

 in any statistics which have come down to us. Smith's Diary, 

 is, on this point an important, if not unique document. Though 

 it seems to stand alone, its testimony is as frequent and precise 

 as could be desired in any reason, or as the case could well 

 admit. Years are repeatedly noticed at short intervals, as 

 marked by a want of seasonable rains, in language, which, 

 though of necessity less precise than a modern register of 

 temperature, is yet altogether distinct and unequivocal. No 

 one can read the Diary attentively without a full conviction that 

 long and severe droughts were a hundred years since, as now, 

 the great trial of the patience and confidence of the New Eng- 

 land farmer. Thus, we find such dry spells noticed as occurring 

 in the following years, between 1743 and 1762, inclusive, a 

 period of just twenty years, 1743, 1746, 1747, 1748, 1749, 1752, 

 1754, 1757, 1761, 1762, being ten years out of twenty. 



As we have derived the greater portion of our agricultural 

 knowledge from English writers, and almost all our cultivated 

 plants from English gardeners, we can scarce avoid comparing 

 at every step, our own climate with that of England, and on the 

 slightest acquaintance with the subject, are struck with the 

 great contrasts which exist between them. These are generally 

 known, and may be stated briefly as follows : — •- 



1. Much more rain falls, annually, in New England than in 

 most parts of Great Britain,* though the impression of common 

 observers is probably tlie reverse. This difference may be 

 more precisely understood from the following comparison of 

 the fall of rain in twelve months at Chiswick, near London, 



* I say in most parts of England. We are told in a Prize Essay on the English 

 climate, (piil)lished in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society, 1850,) that in 

 some of the western counties, the mountainous district of Cumberland, for instance, 

 fifty, a hundred, or even a hundred and twenty, inches of rain sometimes fall in 

 the course of the year. As a general rule, nearly twice as much rain falls on the 

 Bouth-west part England as in the neighborhood of London. 



