322 COSMOS. 



developed by Leopold von Buch in all its various phenomena, 

 both with respect to its influence on vegetation and agricul- 

 ture, on the transparency of the atmosphere, the radiation of 

 the soil, and the elevation of the line of perpetual snow. In 

 the interior of the Asiatic Continent, Tobolsk, Barnaul on the 

 Oby, and Irkutsk, have the same mean summer heat as Ber- 

 lin, Munster, and Cherbourg in Normandy, the thermometer 

 sometimes remaining for weeks together at 86° or 88°, while 

 the mean winter temperature is, during the coldest month, as 

 low as — 0°*4 to — 4°. These continental climates have 

 therefore justly been termed excessive by the great mathema- 

 tician and physicist Buffon ; and the inhabitants who live in 

 countries having such excessive climates seem almost con- 

 demned, as Dante expresses himself, 



" A sofFerir tormeuti caldi e geli."* 



In no portion of the earth, neither in the Canary Islands, 

 in Spain, nor in the south of France, have I ever seen more 

 luxuriant fruit, especially grapes, than in Astrachan, near the 

 shores of the Caspian Sea (46° 21'). Although the mean 

 annual temperature is about 48°, the mean summer heat 

 rises to 70°, as at Bordeaux, while not only there, but also 

 further to the south, as at Kislar on the mouth of the Terek 

 (in the latitude of Avignon and Rimini), the thermometer 

 sinks in the winter to — 13° or — 22°. 



Ireland, Guernsey, and Jersey, the peninsula of Brittany, 

 the coasts of Normandy, and of the south of England, present, 

 by the mildness of their winters, and by the low temperature 

 and clouded sky of their summers, the most striking contrast 

 to the continental climate of the interior of Eastern Europe, 

 In the northeast of Ireland (54° 56'), lying under the same par- 

 allel of latitude as Konigsberg in Prussia, the myrtle blooms 

 as luxuriantly as in Portugal. The mean temperature of the 

 month of August, which in Hungary rises to 70^, scarcely 

 reaches 61° at Dublin, which is situated on the same isother- 

 mal line of 49° ; the mean winter temperature, which falls to 

 about 28° at Pesth, is 40° at Dublin (whose mean annual 

 temperature is not more than 49°) ; 3°'6 higher than that of 

 Milan, Pavia, Padua, and the whole of Lombardy, where the 

 mean annual temperature is upward of 55 '. At Stromness, 

 in the Orkneys, scarcely half a degree further south than Stock- 

 holm, the winter temperature is 39°, and consequently iiighei 

 ^han that of Paris, and nearly as high as that of London. 



* Dante, Divina Commedia. Purgatorio, cauto iii. 



