CLIMATE OF CANADA.
From Sketches, by a Backwoodsman.
It never has been accountable to me, how the heat of the sun is regulated. There is no part of Upper Canada that is not to the south of Penzance, yet there is no part of England where the cold is so intense as in Canada; nay, there is no cold in England equal to the cold of Virginia, which, were it on the European side of the hemisphere, would be looked upon as an almost tropical climate. To explain to an European what the climate of Upper Canada is, we would say, that in summer it is the climate of Italy, in winter that of Holland; but in either case we should only be giving an illustration, for in both winter and summer it possesses peculiarities which neither of these two climates possess. The summer heat of Upper Canada generally ranges towards 80° Fahrenheit; but should the wind blow twenty-four hours steadily from the north, it will fall to 40° during the night. The reason of this seems to be the enormous quantity of forest over which that wind blows, and the leaves of the trees affording such an extensive surface of evaporation. One remarkable peculiarity in the climate of Canada, when compared with those to which we have likened it, is its dryness. Far from the ocean, the salt particles that somehow or other exist in the atmosphere of sea-bounded countries are not to be found here; roofs of tinned iron of fifty years' standing are as bright as the day they came out of the shop; and you may leave a charge of powder in your gun for a month, and find, at the end of it, that it goes off without hanging fire. The diseases of the body, too, that are produced by a damp atmosphere, are uncommon here. It may be a matter of surprise to some to hear, that pectoral and catarrhal complaints, which, from an association of ideas they may connect with cold, are here hardly known. In the cathedral at Montreal, where from three to five thousand people assemble every Sunday, you will seldom find the service interrupted by a cough, even in the dead of winter and in hard frost; whereas, in Britain, from the days of Shakspeare, even in a small country church, "coughing drowns the parson's saw." Pulmonary consumption, too, the scourge alike of England and the sea-coast of America, is so rare in the northern parts of New York and Pennsylvania, and the whole of Upper Canada, that in eight years' residence I have not seen as many cases of the disease as I have in a day's visit to a provincial infirmary at home. The only disease we are annoyed with here, that we are not accustomed to at home, is the intermittent fever,—and that, though most abominably annoying, is not by any means dangerous: indeed, one of the most annoying circumstances connected with it is, that, instead of being sympathized with, you are only laughed at. Otherwise the climate is infinitely more healthy than that of England. Indeed, it may be pronounced the most healthy country under the sun, considering that whisky can be procured for about one shilling sterling per gallon. Though the cold of a Canadian winter is great, it is neither distressing nor disagreeable. There is no day during winter, except a rainy one, in which a man need be kept from his work. It is a fact, though as startling as some of the dogmas of the Edinburgh school of political economy, that the thermometer is no judge of warm or cold weather. Thus, with us in Canada, when it is low, (say at zero,) there is not a breath of hair, and you can judge of the cold of the morning by the smoke rising from the chimney of a cottage, and shooting up straight like the steeple of a church, then gradually melting away in the beautiful clear blue of the morning sky: yet in such weather it is impossible to go through a day's march in your great coat; whereas, at home, when the wind blows from the north-east, though the thermometer stands at from 55° to 60° you find a fire far from oppressive. The fact is, that a Canadian winter is by far the pleasantest season of the year, for everybody is idle, and everybody is determined to enjoy himself. Between the summer and winter of Canada, a season exists, called the Indian summer. During this period, the atmosphere has a smoky, hazy effect, which is ascribed by the people generally to the simultaneous burning of the prairies of the western part of the continent. This explanation I take to be absurd; since, if it were so to be accounted for, the wind must necessarily blow from that quarter, which is not in all instances the case. During this period, which generally occupies two or three weeks of the month of November, the days are pleasant, and with abundance of sunshine, and the nights present a cold, clear, black frost. When this disappears, the rains commence, which always precede winter; for it is a proverb in the Lower Province, among the French Canadians, that the ditches never freeze till they are full. Then comes the regular winter, which, if rains and thaws do not interfere, is very pleasant; and that is broken up by rains again, which last until the strong sun of the middle of May renders everything dry and in good order. A satirical friend of mine gave a caricature account of the climate of the province, when he said that, for two months of the spring and two months of the autumn, you are up to your middle in mud; for four months of summer you are broiled by the heat, choked by the dust, and devoured by the mosquitoes; and for the remaining four months, if you get your nose above the snow, it is to have it bit off by the frost.