ee on ene ES 
On a change of Climate. 131 
of poets and historians, many have been anxious to suppose that the 
peculiarity they describe, has long since ceased to exist; and they 
have deduced from this supposed difference between the ancient and 
modern climate of Scythia, a proof that by the destruction of forests, 
the draining of marshes, and the triumphant progress of agriculture, 
the temperature, not only of certain districts, but of the earth itself, 
has been improved.* But how far all or any of these changes may 
be able to produce effects so extensive, as it may reasonably admit 
of doubt, so it is in the present instance superfluous to inquire; since 
in Seythia these causes have never operated, and no apparent melio- 
ration of the climate has taken place. ‘The country still continues, 
' the most part, in the wild state painted by Herodotus and Strabo ; 
and all the countries bordering on the Euxine Sea are still subject to 
an annual severity of winter, of which (though in a far higher lati- 
tude,) the inhabitants of our own country can hardly form an idea. 
“That water freezes when poured on the ground; that the ground 
in winter is muddy only where a fire is kindled ; that copper kettles 
are burst by the freezing of their contents; that asses, being animals 
impatient of cold, are found here neither in a wild nor tame state,— 
are circumstances no less characteristic of modern Scythia, than of 
Scythia as described by Herodotus and Strabo.t Nor do I ques- 
tion the authority of the latter, when he assures us that the Bospho- 
tus has beensometimes so firmly frozen, that there has been a beaten 
and miry high-way between Panticapeum and Phanagoria; or that 
=e of the generals of Mithridates gained there, during the winter, a 
Nietory with his cavalry, where, the preceding summer, his fleet had 
been successful. In the neighborhood 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. 
7ut such events must, from the force of the current, have at all 
mes, been of rare occurrence. By the best information which I 
“ould procure on the spot, though the straits are regularly so far 
blocked up by ice as to prevent navigation, there is generally a free 
Passage for the stream unfrozen. Across the harbor of Phanagoria, 
however, sledges are driven with safety ; and on the other side of 
rimea, a Russian officer assured me that he had driven over 
Pita en 
Pt = 
Howard’s Theory of the Earth. t Herod. Melpom. 28—~Strabo, L. vii. 
