102 REPORT ON THE STATE CABINET. 



So in the autumn. The weather grows cold very regularly with the 

 advance of the season, until October 27th, when it is 41°.54, with 

 extremes of 69° and 28°. The next day the average rises to 45°.17, 

 with extremes of 66° and 30°, and does not reach 41°.54 again until the 

 10th of November, except for a single day, November 8th, when it is 

 41°.13 with extremes 64°.5 and 29°.5, and the average for the whole 

 twelve days is 45°.64 ; but unlike the spring frost, the autumn, or Indian 

 summer grows warm to its centre, reaching an average of 48°.25 on the 

 first days in November, and then gradually declining again to the tem- 

 perature of the 27th of October. 



I have no means at my command for ascertaining how extensive these 

 phenomena of summer-frost and autumn-summer may be ; nor is it easy 

 to assign a cause for them that will be entirely and altogether satisfactory. 

 I am inclined to think, however, that it may be peculiar to our part of 

 the Northern continent, as the monsoons are to the Indian ocean. This 

 inference, which I make in the absence of all definite statistics, is, of 

 course, purely theoretical, and derived from the views which I proceed 

 to suggest of the cause of this phenomena. 



Before proceeding, however, with the theoretical explanation, I would 

 make a remark on the state of meteorological statistics in this respect. 

 Mere vague impression, based on personal feelings and recollections, is a 

 foundation for opinion in meteorology at least, which one learns the more 

 to distrust the more he has occasion to deal with it. Scarcely anything 

 in vny experience has been more common than to find people's impressions 

 of the general average of the weather for a given period in conflict with 

 the observed and recorded facts. But again, the statistics as recorded 

 and summed up and reported in the published works on climate, afford no 

 indication of such a retardation and retrocession of the advance of the 

 seasons ; nor do they, on the other hand, fm-nish any indication that such 

 phenomena do not occur ; for no average but one like that I have made — 

 an average for every day, day by day, through a series of years — ^could 

 show whether such an event occurs or not; and no such average has 

 before been made, to my knowledge. An average for each month or each 

 half month, nay, an average for each week even, would hardly draw 

 attention to the phenomena. 



And now for the explanation. I have referred to the "waviness" of 

 the line of real temperature in the accompanying diagram. By referring 

 to the diagram again, we shall see that these two changes in the curva- 

 ture of the line occur as the first great tvave-reactions after the equinoxes. 



