Scientific Intelligence. — Meteorology. 385 



cessful. In the neighbourhood of the latter of these towns, by 

 the Russians since called Tmutaracan, a Slavonic inscription has 

 been discovered, which records the measurement of these straits 

 over the ice, by command of the Russian prince Gleb, in the 

 year 1068. But such events must, from the force of the current, 

 have at all times been of rare occurrence. By the best informa- 

 tion which I could procure on the spot, though the straits are 

 regularly so far blocked vip by ice as to prevent navigation, 

 there is generally a free passage for the stream unfrozen. Across 

 the harbour of Phanagoria, however, sledges are driven with 

 safety ; and, on the other side of the Crimea, a Russian officer 

 assured me that he had driven over the estuary of the rivers Bog 

 and Dnieper, from Otchakof to Kinburn. But not only straits 

 and estuaries, but the whole Sea of Asoph is annually frozen in 

 November [!] and is seldom navigable earlier than April. This 

 sea is fished during winter, through holes cut with mattocks in 

 the ice, with large nets, which are thrust by poles from one to 

 the other ; a method which has given rise to Strabo's exagge- 

 rated picture, of " fish as large as dolphins (apparently meaning 

 the beluga), dug out of ice with spades." This remarkable se- 

 verity of climate on the northern shores of the Euxine, may in- 

 duce us to give a proportionate faith to what the ancients assure 

 us of its southern and eastern shores ; and though Ovid may be 

 supposed to have exaggerated the miseries of his banishment ; 

 and though religious as well as African prejudice may have 

 swayed TertuUian, in his dismal account of Pontus, it is cer- 

 tain that Strabo can be influenced by neither of these motives, 

 where he accounts for Homer's ignorance of Paphlagonia, " be- 

 cause this region was inaccessible, through its severity of cli- 

 mate."" To account for this phenomenon is far more difficult than 

 to establish its existence ; and the difficulty is greater because 

 some of those theories by which the problems of climate have 

 been usually solved, will, in the present instance, apply. In 

 elevation above the sea, which, when considerable, is an obvious 

 and undoubted cause of cold, the downs of European Tartary 

 do not exceed those of England. Forests, the removal of which 

 has in many countries been supposed to diminish frost, have 

 here never existed ; and though the custom of burning withered 

 grass in spring, which has been for so many centuries the only 



