CLIMATE. 45 



is comparatively level, we do not mean to be understood 

 that it is actually and entirely flat, though we know this 

 is the generally received opinion, and quite on a par with 

 some of the other ideas that are wafted across land and 

 sea concerning our sunny Florida. " Low and damp, and 

 generally malarial," those are the terms a supposed-to-be- 

 reliable professor applied to her not very long ago in the 

 columns of a magazine that should have more carefully 

 guarded its pages against the crime of " bearing false wit- 

 ness against its neighbors." We shall have more to say 

 about that charge by and by, for we intend to look thor- 

 oughly into this question of Florida's climate, since upon 

 this point hinges the whole subject of her suitability as a 

 home — a healthy, happy home worthy of the name. 



But just now we have to do with her surface, which is 

 by no means uniformly level ; in fact, one of its greatest 

 and oddest features is its picturesque lack of uniformity 

 of any kind, for it is all one strange mixture of rock and 

 sand, hill and flat woods, pine land, and hammock land, 

 rivers and lakes, interior and coast line, fruits of the 

 tropics, the semi-tropics, and the temperate zones ; trees of 

 the equatorial regions, and of the colder climes, and vege- 

 tables of the most tender as well as the most hardy kinds. 



Florida is more than seven times as large as Massachu- 

 setts. It is larger than the States of New Hampshire, 

 Vermont, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Dela- 

 ware, and Rhode Island combined. Florida is one fourth 

 larger than the great Empire State of New York, and 

 fifty per cent greater than the State of Ohio with its pop- 

 ulation of three millions. Stepping across the Atlantic, 

 we find it covering considerably more territory than Greece, 

 Belgium, and Switzerland, and it goes squarely over the 

 whole of England by a surplus of nine thousand square 

 pailes. 



