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