100 Tue WEATHER OF 1905. 
free from the northerly and easterly winds which commonly pre- 
vail at that season. But April brought a change, with a tempera- 
ture scarcely higher than that of March, a snowstorm in the end 
of the first week, and an amount of frost in first half of the month 
which made it much liker a winter than a spring month. The 
aggregate degrees of frost were 16.4 deg., occurring in six nights, 
and exceeding that experienced in December. But this was more 
than compensated by the more auspicious weather of May and 
the summer months which followed, which were hailed as a happy 
return to the sunshine and warmth which are not infrequently 
conspicuous by their absence. ‘The result was that, although the 
unfavourable weather of April, which was both cold and wet, 
awakened fears of a late harvest like that of 1903, it turned out 
to be earlier than usual, except in the far north, which was sub- 
jected to rainier conditions, and proved to be both abundant in 
quantity and excellent in quality. 
I now pass on to the rainfall, in the deficiency of which we 
find the special characteristic of the weather of 1905, which dis- 
tinguishes it from that of many previous years. The whole 
amount for the year was 30.57 in., with 194 days on which it fell. 
I have not noticed in this account the days in which snow fell and 
the amount separately from rain. But I find on looking over 
the record that there were only four days on which this occurred, 
two in January, one in February, and one in April, and that the 
amount when melted and measured was only 0.49 in. The 
average annual amount over nineteen years is 37.31 in., so that 
the deficiency for the past year was nearly seven inches, which is 
equivalent to almost seven hundred tons of water per acre. This 
deficiency was spread over the greatest part of the year. There 
were nine months in which the amount was less than the average, 
viz., January, February, May, June, July, August, September, 
October, and December; and only three in which it was above, 
viz., March, April, and November. The wettest month was 
March, with a record of 4.06 in., which is an inch and a half more 
than the mean, and the driest was January, which is nearly the 
same amount less than the mean. One peculiarity of the past year 
was the dryness of the winter months, January, February, and 
December ; but it was likewise characteristic of the late spring 
and summer months, May, June, and July, during which the com- 
parative absence of cloudy skies and frequent showers resulted in 
