1883.] Burning Mountains . 329 
potency of seasons, we have yet something that needs 
clearing up. Mr. Mallet shows that with regard to earth- 
quake shocks we have in the Northern Hemisphere, broadly 
speaking, a minimum of shocks in May, June, and the early 
part of July, and still fewer during September. Most shocks 
indubitably come in January, and many in August and 
October. Further, there are more shocks at the critical 
epochs of the year, the equinoxes and solstices. Here we 
might pause and enquire whether this lateral push, that 
throws the earth’s surface into rolling billows, may not arise 
from heat expanding or cold contracting its surface ; for 
what do we understand by the seasons but an increase or 
decrease of warmth ? But it will be said, if the shocks 
that occur in winter preponderate over those which happen 
during the summer season, it must be cold, not warmth, 
that heaves the soil and vexes and pinches the fuelled 
entrails of the Typhcean monster that sleeps beneath the 
volcano. I had fancied so until the following solution of the 
paradox suggested itself : — 
A little thought will convince anyone that the march 
of climate does not wholly depend on the progress of the sun 
north and south ; we have an influx of cold or spells of 
warmth at every season of various duration. The fickle ice 
of winter may at any time break up, and cold shivering days 
and weeks arrive in June ; more than this, the very tissue 
of the seasons is wove of such alternations, and Italy, no 
less than storm-swept England, is victimised by them. A 
sojourner at Naples, where the spring air is conceived to be 
ever balmy and delicate, thus writes on the 17th of last 
March : — “ Long before it is time for the primrose to spread 
its petals, we have, at the very first sign of spring, not only 
the daffodil, but troops of bright oxalis, making sunshine on 
every green bank ; then follow the sweet-scented violets, 
anemones, white starwort and composite flowers, that glad- 
den the many-clefted hills of the Vomero and Posilipo. 
Balmy breezes fan our cheeks, and little birds flit twittering 
from tree to tree. All this delight we have already enjoyed 
is just now interrupted by the vagaries of mad March, who 
has turned the upper half of Vesuvius into a sugar-cone.” 
Climatic changes in Italy are most felt in the plains of 
Lombardy, which bear much the same relation in that 
respeCf to the central and southern portion of the Peninsula 
that Scotland does to the South of England. To these va- 
riations of temperature Prof. D. Ragona, Director of the 
Royal Observatory at Modena, has lately direded attention 
in a paper, “ Sur les Periodes Annuelles de Chaud et de 
vol. v. (third series). z 
