200 INFLUENCE OF PRECIPITATION.—GENERAL RESULTS. 
blowing away, or from melting in the brief thaws of winter. I 
have already remarked that bare ground freezes much deeper 
than that which is covered by beds of leaves, and when the 
earth is thickly coated with snow, the strata frozen before it 
fell begin to thaw. It is not uncommon to find the ground in 
the woods, where the snow lies two or three feet deep, entirely 
free from frost, when the atmospheric temperature has been 
for several weeks below the freezing-point, and for some days 
even below the zero of Fahrenheit. When the ground is 
cleared and brought under cultivation, the leaves are ploughed 
into the soil and decomposed, and the snow, especially upon 
knolls and eminences, is blown off, or perhaps half thawed, 
several times during the winter. The water from the melting 
snow runs into the depressions, and when, after a day or two 
of warm sunshine or tepid rain, the cold returns, it is consoli- 
dated to ice, and the bared ridges and swells of earth are deeply 
frozen.* It requires many days of mild weather to raise the 
temperature of soil in this condition, and of the air in contact 
with it, to that of the earth in the forests of the same climatic 
region. Flora is already plaiting her sylvan wreath before the 
corn-flowers which are to deck the garland of Ceres have waked 
from their winter’s sleep; and it is probably not a popular 
error to believe that, where man has substituted his artificial 
crops for the spontaneous harvest of nature, spring delays her 
coming. 
* T have seen, in Northern New England, the surface of the open ground 
frozen to the depth of twenty-two inches, in the month of November, when in 
the forest-earth no frost was discoverable; and later in the winter, I have 
known an exposed sand-knoll to remain frozen six feet deep, after the ground 
in the woods was completely thawed. 
+ The conclusion arrived at by Noah Webster, in his very learned and able 
paper on the supposed change in the temperature of winter, read before the 
Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1799, was as follows: ‘‘ irom a 
careful comparison of these facts, it appears that the weather, in modern win- 
ters, in the United States, is more inconstant than when the earth was covered 
with woods, at the first settlement of Europeans in the country; that the 
warm weather of autumn extends further into the winter months, and the 
cold weather of winter and spring encroaches upon the summer}; that, the 
