386 The Weather during the Agricultural Year , 1907-1908. 
damage. Corn and hay stacks were in many cases overturned, 
and trees uprooted, a whole avenue of firs in the King’s estate 
at Sandringham being almost entirely demolished. At the close 
of February another gale of less severity occurred, and snow fell 
pretty generally, in some places to a considerable depth. 
For the winter as a whole the mean temperature was below 
the normal in all but the south-western districts ; rainfall was 
deficient over central and southern England, but in excess of 
the average in the west and north ; bright sunshine was 
abundant in the south and also in the north, but scanty in the 
intermediate districts. 
The Spring op 1908. 
Until the opening of May the weather of the spring was 
almost continuously cold and inclement. The exceedingly slow 
progress of vegetation proved, however, little short of an 
unmixed blessing. In a more advanced season irreparable 
damage would have been occasioned by the phenomenally cold 
weather which set in towards the close of April. As it was, the 
sharp frosts and snowstorms seem to have had little or no effect, 
and in May the growth of the crops was stimulated to an 
unusual extent by a long spell of warm weather, accompanied 
in the earlier part of the month by a humid atmosphere and 
rather frequent showers. 
In March the weather was exceedingly cold and changeable, 
the only periods of anything like seasonable warmth occurring 
about the 8th of the month, or between the 22nd and 24th. 
The sharpest frosts were experienced in the first and third 
weeks, and were accompanied in most places by falls of snow 
or sleet. On the earlier occasion the sheltered thermometer 
fell below 20" in many northern and central districts, and below 
15° in a few isolated parts of North Britain. In the third week 
the coldest weather was experienced over the eastern half of the 
country, where the thermometer fell to about the same level as 
at the beginning of the month. Over England the rainfall of the 
month, though frequent , was seldom heavy, the only material 
exception occurring on the 5th, when a copious downpour was 
experienced in some parts of Devon and Cornwall. In Wales 
and Scotland heavy falls were fairly general on the 24th 
and 25th. 
The cold winds which prevailed so commonly in March 
continued throughout nearly the whole of April, and in London 
no temperature as high as 60" was recorded until the 29th of the 
month — an event without parallel in the meteorological history 
of the previous thirty-five years. In many other parts of the 
country, however, a spell of genial warmth occurred about the 
middle of the month, the thermometer on the 16th and 17th 
