294 tROFESSOE G. E. POST^ M.D. 



parts of the country enable me to say that one can predict with almost 

 certainty the change of clothing needed to make himself comfortable, both 

 by day and night. And in journeys of many days together, the same changes 

 are required at the same hours. 



Such sudden changes as those from our sultry August mornings to our 

 cool afternoon thunder-gusts, and chilly damp nights, are quite tmhnoioii in 

 Syria and Palestine. Twice only in twenty-three years has the writer 

 known of a serious rain-storm in midsummer, and even then it was un- 

 accompanied with severe cold. 



It may be safely said again, then, that on the sea-coast and inland plains 

 and the lower mountains, during the whole of the dry season, the climate is 

 equable, and a traveller has need of few precautions against changes of 

 weather. 



On the mountain tops of Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, above 8,000 feet, the 

 great snow-drifts cool the air at night almost to the freezing point. The writer 

 encamped for three nights of September on Jebel Suiinin, at a height of 

 8,500 feet, and found the range between day and night about 35° F. Never- 

 theless, the temperature of any given hour of one day varied little from that 

 of the preceding or succeeding ones. 



As the rainy season approaches, the range of variation between one day 

 and another increases, and reaches its maximum towards the end of the heavy 

 rains in the latter part of February and the early part of March, when the 

 sirocco winds sometimes raise the temperature to almost summer heat, and 

 the sudden change to the stormy winds brings about as sudden a fall, almost 

 to midwinter cold. Some of the heaviest falls of snow on the mountains come 

 after a heated term in the latter part of the winter ; yet, even then, the 

 changes are infrequent, and when a change has taken place, either to fair 

 weather or foul, it is apt to last for several days. Thus we often have ten 

 days or a fortnight of clear, cool, but even weather in midwinter, followed by 

 the prodromata of a storm, and then an equal period of boisterous wind, 

 driving rain, and often, what is for this country, severe cold, varying, 

 of course, with the altitude. 



Among other evidences of the regularity of the climate, I may mention 

 the almost uniformity of the occurrence of sheet-lightning in the north for 

 several days before the " early rain " in the autunni. This phenomenon is so 

 constant, that on its occurrence every one predicts the speedy approach of the 

 first longed-for shower of autumn. This lightning, which is often as vivid 

 and beautiful as the aurora borealis of northern latitudes, is far distant, 

 unaccompanied by any rumbling of thunder, and often with a sky quite 

 cloudless except in the north, where the display is made, and sometimes in 

 a sky quite cloudless everywhere. This lightning does not occur in mid- 

 summer nor in spring. In winter the lightning is more regularly seen in the 

 west and south-west, though it may appear in other quarters of the sky. 

 Thunderstorms of sudden origin are not known here at all. The severest 

 strokes of lightning occur in the course of the long, steady winter storms. 



