THE CLIMATE OF THE NORTH COAST OF WALES. 217 
far nobody has been able to account for that difference by 
means of meteorological instruments. We all know that one 
place ‘‘ agrees with us” better than another, but nobody knows 
why. And if our physical condition is affected by the climate 
in which we live, and if, as is undoubtedly the case, our mental 
condition is largely dependent on our physical, is it not 
clear that in course of time, our character and that of 
our descendants to whom it is transmitted, will become pro- 
foundly modified by any change? I cannot conceive that 
the descendants of English Colonists, say in the hot dry 
climate of Queensland, will not be very different people 
from their progenitors in the course of a century or two. 
Dr QuaTREFAGES many years ago asserted that the white 
inhabitants of the United States were becoming assimilated to 
the aboriginal Red Indians in their features, owing to the 
influence of their dry climate. And I do not think it is fanciful 
to suggest, that the peculiarities of the Irish people may be due 
as much to the influences of climate as of race. If so, then we 
can understand how the English settlers, in early days, came to 
be as the old Historian wrote, ‘‘ Hibernicis zpsis Hiberniores” — 
more Irish than the Irish themselves. But in the north-east, 
where the climate is drier, the descendants of the English and 
Scotch settlers of Cromwell’s time, seem to have retained their 
original energy and industry. It is not avery comfortable theory 
for Irish reformers, as they will hardly find the moisture-laden 
breezes of the Atlantic amenable to Acts of Parliament ! 
One more illustration of the effect of a difference in rain-fall 
on the habitat of a plant. In Flintshire, Parnassia palustris 
(Grass of Parnassus), grows in marshy ground alongside the 
railway, near Mostyn Station, about the level of high-water at 
spring tides. I think our botanists will bear me out when I 
say, that it would be utterly useless to look for it even in wet 
places on Halkyn Mountain. Yet fifty miles east of Halkyn, on 
the hill side above Buxton, more than 1000 feet above the sea, 
it grows abundantly on the steep slopes of the old heaps of mine 
waste—just such heaps, and from the same kind of mines (lead), 
from the same formation, viz., Carboniferous Limestone, as are 
fouhd all over Halkyn Mountain. The explanation no doubt is 
to be found in the fact, that while the rainfall at Buxton on an 
average of three years is 47-25 inches, that on Halkyn Mountain 
is 30°55 inches. 
Having, I trust, shown the importance of climate as a factor 
in geographical distribution, I will go on to show what the 
difference, so far as it can be indicated by the Thermometer and 
the Rain-gauge, is between the Coast climate of our district and 
that of the neighbourhood of London. For purposes of tempera- 
ture, I have taken the Quarterly Returns from the Royal 
Observatory, Greenwich, for the nine years during which they 
have been published by Mr. GuaisHeR in the Registrar-General’s 
