222 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



into a different climate. The air of the valley was damp and 

 chilly, and in spite of the warming influence of the president's 

 tea, aided by a thick shawl, we could not avoid shivering. 



It is a great mistake to suppose that altitude will necessarily 

 give us a pure atmosphere. There are as many marshes and 

 boggy meadows on the hills as in the valleys, and typhoid fevers 

 are the scourge of our mountain towns, as they are of the 

 borders of our lakes and stagnant waters at lower elevations. 

 We have encountered on the Berkshire hills the same chilly air 

 that we experienced last summer in the Hadley valley, and 

 have uniformly been able to trace it to some marshy or damp 

 locality near by. 



The effect of soil and locality on the climate is further mani- 

 fest from the earlier approach of spring and the longer con- 

 tinuance of vegetation in the autumn in some localities than in 

 others of the same latitude and the same elevation. The word 

 climate signifies in the original, a declination ; and on the south 

 side of a hill, in our northern latitude, we find a much warmer 

 air and an earlier vegetation than on the north side, because 

 the southern slope receives the sun's rays more perpendicularly. 

 "We have no doubt that the southern slope is also most healthy, 

 as there is a vitality in the sun's rays aside from their heating 

 power. We are not prepared to go all lengths with modern 

 solar chemistry. We are not satisfied that sunshine is metallic, 

 and that in a sun-bath, we are enveloped with elementary iron, 

 sodium, magnesium, calcium, chromium, nickel, barium, copper 

 and zinc. But whether light consists of minute particles of 

 matter as we were taught in our childhood, or comes in waves 

 as does sound as we afterwards taught, or consists of a metallic 

 shower as some chemists now teach, we fully believe there is a 

 life-giving power in sunshine which no farmer can afford to lose 

 for himself, his family, his stock and his growing crops. Physi- 

 cians assure us that patients on the sunny side of hospitals 

 recover more rapidly than those on the north side, and a sun- 

 bath is now a frequent prescription. We all know how deli- 

 cately a potato vine grows in the cellar where the sunlight 

 sparingly penetrates, and that a young lady shut up in a 

 darkened parlor becomes about as colorless as the potato vine. 

 We see also the sunny side of an apple having not only a deeper 

 coloring but a higher flavor, proving that the peculiar chemical 



