8 THE CANADIAN IIOETICULTURIST. 



and eight o'clock a.m., for on that day the mercury was actually frozen! 

 yes, frozen solid — clean shrunk into the bulb below the figure 40, and 

 refused to come out again till brought within the influence of artificial 

 heat! It will be readily imagined that as I found some people hard 

 to convince that my thermometer was correct, they might be fully as 

 sceptical regarding my own correctness in stating that the mercury 

 had been frozen, so, to anticipate any doubts on that score, I was no 

 sooner convinced of the frozen state of the mercury than I ran out and 

 brought in two witnesses who could testify to the fact. One of them 

 has been long since dead, but the other is alive and well, and living in 

 the Town of Orangeville. A rather dry customer, one of the village 

 wits, remarked, that " it was a good thing the mercury did freeze, for 

 otherwise there was no telling how cold it might have got." 



Now, there are Baldwin apple trees in tlie Township of Erin, (Erin 

 has a gravelly soil) thriving and bearing crops every year, that were 

 planted long before 1859, proving, in a suitable soil, that apple will 

 bear a greater degree of cold than has generally been supposed, and 

 will sustain without injury a temperature that in more unfavorable 

 circumstances is fatal to much hardier varieties. 



I have not, as I said before, during the last eighteen years seen the 

 jthermometer more than 22° below zero, and 1 have not heard, what I 

 frecpiently used to hear before that time, frame buildings cracking with, 

 a report as loud as that of a pistol, which was always considered an 

 infallible indication of a hard frost, and was indeed a practical reliaz- 

 ation of a " cold snap." Perhaps our climate is really moderating. 

 It may be that as the country becomes dermded of its timber the rays 

 of the summer sun beat down upon the naked earth, which thus 

 imbibes a latent heat that in some degree moderates the intensity of 

 the wintry frost. And supposing our climate is thus changing, it will 

 only be doing as other climates are supposed to have done in the 

 times gone by. Strabo, who lived nearly nineteen centuries ago, says 

 that the winters in the middle and north of France (then called Gaul) 

 were so severe that it was not supposed the grape would ripen north 

 of the Cevennes mountains, Notwithstanding which, it is a fact that 

 the Province of Bergundy, which has for hundreds of years produced 

 the finest wines in the world, is not only a long way north of those 

 mountains, but is in about the same latitude as Quebec, and the vine- 

 yards are principally in terraces up the sides and on the tops of hills 



