132 On a change of Climate. 
the estaary of the rivers Bog and Dnieper, from Otchakof to Kin- 
burn. But not only straits and estuaries, but the whole sea of Azoph 
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 exag- 
gerated picture, of ‘fish as large as dolphins, (apparently meaning 
the bieluga) dug out of the ice with spades.’ This remarkable se- 
verity of climate on the northern shores of the Euxine, may induce 
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 re-- 
ligious as well as African prejudice may have swayed Tertullian in 
his dismal account of Pontus, it is certain that Strabo can be influ- 
enced by neither of these motives, where he accounts for Homer's 
ignorance of Paphlagonia, ‘because this region was inaccessible 
through its severity of climate.’ | 
"To account for this phenomenon, is far more difficult than to es- 
tablish its existence ; and the difficulty is greater, because none of 
those theories by which the problems of climate have been usually 
solved, will, in the present instance, a ply. In elevation above the 
sea, which, when considerable, is an obvious and undoubted cause of 
cold, the downs of European Tartary do not exceed these of Eng- 
land. Forests, the removal of which has in many countries been 
supposed to diminish frost, have here never existed ; and though the 
custom of burning the withered grass in spring, which has been for 
so many centuries the only secret of Scythian husbandry, may have 
produced in many parts of this vast pasture, a considerable deposit of 
saltpetre, it is not easy to suppose with Gibbon, that a cause like this 
can produce such bitterness of wind, or such unvarying rigor of wine 
ter. It may be observed, however, (and the observation, though it 
will not solve the difficulty, may perhaps direct our attention into the 
right train of inquiry) that it is only in comparison with the more 
western parts of Europe, that the climate of Scythia is a subject of 
surprise ; and that in each of the two great continents, we discover in 
our progress eastward, along the same parallel of latitude, a sensible 
and uniform increase of cold. Vienna is colder than Paris ; Astra- 
chan than Vienna; the eastern districts of Asia are incomparably 
colder than Astrachan ; and Choka, an island of the Pacific, in the 
same latitude with Astrachan or Paris, was found by the Russian cit- 
