GENERAL RESULTS. 197 



covered by beds of leaves, and when the eartb is thickly coated 

 witb snow, the strata frozen before it fell begin to tliaw. It is 

 not uncommon to find the ground in the woods, where the snow 

 Hes 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 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 con- 

 sohdated 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 eiTor 

 to beheve that, where man has substituted his artificial crops for 

 the spontaneous harvest of nature, spring delays her coming, f 



* I 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. 



f 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 : " From 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 wind 

 being more variable, snow is less permanent, and perhaps the same remark may 

 be applicable to the ice of the rivers. These effects seem to result necessarily 

 from the greater quantity of heat accumulated in the earth in summer since 

 the ground has been cleared of wood and exposed to the rays of the sun, and 

 to the greater depth of frost in the earth in winter by the exposure of its un- 

 covered surface to the cold atmosphere," — Collection of Papers by Noah Web" 

 8TEK, p. 163. 



