67 



the moon was a dull red, she was nearly at her highest eleva- 

 tion, and had the colour of heated brick," &c. * 



This unnatural summer is said to have been followed by a 

 severe winter, with " a frost of nine weeks' continuance." And 

 it is not improbable that the severity of the latter may have 

 been in some way connected with it. But if a season is hable 

 to be thus influenced by the character of the one going before, 

 so will the weather at all times be more or less determined by 

 the weather that precedes it, and not merely the weather in 

 that particular locality in which the observer is placed, but in 

 the countries generally around. No sooner has" a change 

 taken place, through the operation, it may be, of mere local 

 causes, in any of the phenomena of the atmosphere in one 

 place, than the change, or some effect traceable to it, is trans- 

 ferred by the agency of the ever- shifting Avinds to other 

 places, even to distant regions — this effect liable to be itself 

 modified by the local circumstances and conditions of each 

 tract of country along which it is conveyed ; and, lastly, the 

 whole disposition of things, such as would have naturally 

 followed if left to itself, subject to yet further interruption, 

 as in the instances above cited, from extraneous causes, which 

 no human foresight can well take in. 



So complicated, indeed, are the conditions which unite to 

 make up the weather at particular times and seasons, that a 

 wise man may well pause before he confidently predicts what 

 the next season is to be. We may rest our guesses upon this 

 or that circumstance, but they are only guesses, which just as 

 often turn out wrong as right. Lord Bacon says, in his Essay 

 "Of Prophecies," — "Men mark when they hit, and never 

 mark when they miss," and this is especially true of weather 

 prophets. Some years, we might almost imagine — from the 

 great irregularity of the seasons, even to the entire dis- 



* " Hayley's Life and Letters of Cowper," vol. i., p. 338. 



