238 Dr. Forry on the Climate of the United States, 6^0. 



temperature of Vermont has risen, according to Dr. Williams, 10° 

 or 12° within a century and a half, it must surely have had an 

 intolerable climate, when our ancestors landed on the rock of Ply- 

 mouth ; and upon the same principle of a general increase of heat 

 in our climate, the cultivation of the olive and the fig, since the 

 first settlement of our country, ought to have advanced as far 

 northward as Pennsylvania, if not to Vermont itself! 



Dr. Webster devotes some ten pages, in his first essay, to the 

 question of the cold of American winters ; and he arrives, from a 

 most extensive investigation of historical facts, at the conclusion, 

 "that the winters have been from the first settlement of America 

 variable, now mild, now severe, just as they are in the present 

 age." A leading object with him is to show the errors of Dr. 

 Williams, who having maintained that the mean temperature of 

 Italy has increased 17°, wished to establish some analogous 

 change in our own climate since its occupation by Europeans ; 

 and Dr. Webster proves most conclusively that " if Dr. Williams 

 is unfortunate in his facts, he is still more so in his reasonings and 

 deductions." 



As respects a supposed change of climate in the United States, 

 the quotation of a single passage from Dr. W.'s essay, must here 

 suffice. According to John Megapolensis, a Dutch clergyman, 

 who resided at Albany just two centuries ago, "the summers are 

 pretty hot, and the winters very cold. The summer continues 

 till All Saints' Day, (Nov. 1,) but then the winter sets in, in the 

 same manner as it commonly does in December, and freezes so 

 much in one night that the ice will bear a man. The freezing 

 commonly continues three months — sometimes there comes a 

 warm and pleasant day, yet the thaw does not continue ; but it 

 freezes again till March, and then commonly the river begins to 

 open, seldom in February." Modern winters, according to this 

 account, have not moderated. A common winter is still of three 

 months^ duration, the Hudson, at Albany, usually freezing early 

 in December, and continuing closed till March. 



From this extensive and learned array of historical facts, Dr. 

 Webster's final conclusion, in his second essay, as regards the in- 

 fluence of clearing the country of its forests upon the seasons of 

 the year, has a striking correspondence with our own deductions. 



" From a careful comparison of these facts," he says, " it appears 

 that the weather, in modern winters, is more inconstant, than 

 when the earth was covered with wood, at the first settlement of 



