in the Temperature of Winter. 17 



to sow barley between the autumnal equinox and the 

 winter solstice. Wheat was not to be soAvn till the last 

 of October, and those who sowed earlier were disap- 

 pointed of a good harvest.... Gfor^'ic i. ' These facts all 

 correspond with each other, and demonstrate that the 

 climate of Italy was then mild, and nearly as mild as it . 

 is at present. The time of sovv'ing w^heat, it will be ob- 

 served, was the same as in Palestine. Severe winters 

 often occur now, as they did 2000 years ago. Several 

 winters ai^e on record within a few centuries, in which 

 vines and trees perished with cold. The winter of 1709 

 killed trees in Italy ; as did that of 1757 in Syria. I can 

 name a number of such Vvir-ters within three or four 

 hundred years. 



No longer ago than 1788 — 9, the winter was so severe 

 in Europe, that the rivers in Estremadura in Spain, and 

 in Alantajo in Portugal, two southern provinces, and of 

 the mildest climate, were covered with ice ; and the 

 m.ountains of Asturia, Leon and Biscay were covered 

 with deep snow, as late as the 6th of March. See the 

 Gazettes of the year 1789. It sliould be remarked that 

 Barcelona, near which the Romans found snow four feet 

 deep, as already related, is in the northern part of Spain. 



Dr. Williams, as a further evidence of a mitigation of 

 the cold in modern winters, mentions the present state 

 of the climate round Constantinople and the Euxine 

 Sea, compared with Ovid's description of it in his days. 

 Ovid was banished to Tomos, near the Euxine, in lat. 

 44, about the 7th year of the Christian Era, and died 

 there in the 15th year, or perhaps the 16th. He men- 

 tions that the Euxine was covered with ice, which was 

 a highway for man and beast, and that wine was offered 

 to him in a state of congelation. All this might be true 

 at the time he was at Tomos, and even frequently true, 

 without supposing the climate essentially different from 

 what it is at present. But when Ovid asserts that the 

 snow, in some places, was not dissolved during the sum- 

 mer, we must understand him to refer to snow on the 

 high mountains ; for all history testifies that the country 

 about the Euxine, and far noilh, was, in Ovid's time^. 



1 ) 



