38 Agricultural Products. — Climate. 



half reasoning beaver, seem to have been placed on these elevated 

 table lands for the very purpose to which they will shortly be ap- 

 plied, that is, as reservoirs for the supply of a canal. 



Agricultural Products. — May 13 : After leaving the town of At- 

 water, we pass over the same kind of low, undulating, diluvial de- 

 posits, that we met with in our yesterday's journey. The soil will 

 everv where admit of cultivation, and produces fine crops of grass, 

 grain, and potatoes. Some low spots will need a few ditches, but 

 generally, where the forests are removed, the earth becomes suffi- 

 ciently dry for all the purposes of agriculture, and for good perma- 

 nent roads. 



Climate. — This change in the surface must ultimately have a very 

 marked influence on the streams of water, rendering them very low 

 and dry in the summer, and more subject to floods in the winter. It 

 will also influence the seasons. As the forests are removed, evapo- 

 ration becomes more rapid, the heat of summer more intense, and 

 rains more rare. Extremes of temperature will be greater. Trees 

 not only exclude the rays of the sun, and prevent evaporation from 

 the surface, but, by the radiation of heat from their leaves, they de- 

 press the temperature, and thus condense the moisture of the atmos- 

 phere, and in a level country supply the place of mountains, in call- 

 ing down humidity from the clouds. Thus, they preserve a more 

 equable temperature in the various seasons, diminishing the heat of 

 summer and mitigating the cold of winter. It is probably from this 

 cause that our winters are said to be more severe, than they were in 

 the first settlement of the country. We have a practical illustration 

 of this theory in the climate of Missouri and Illinois, where the 

 immense prairies are visited by a degree of cold many degrees be- 

 low that of the same parallel in Ohio, and where droughts are much 

 more common. The vicinity of a great fresh water sea, like that of 

 Lake Erie, will be some alleviation to the latter difficulty in this 

 state. The average crops of hay, in this county, are two tons to 

 the acre ; of oats, from thirty to forty bushels ; wheat, about twenty 

 bushels ; and potatoes, three hundred. Indian corn succeeds very 

 well on the chestnut and yellow oak lands, but is not so certain a 

 crop as it is a few miles south and west of " the Reserve." Fruit 

 trees flourish well, and while the peach is often destroyed on the 

 border of the Ohio River by frost, here, at an elevation of five hun- 

 dred feet greater, and a degree and a half further north, the trees 

 are filled with blossoms. It is literally " the land of milk and honey," 



