ds is more familiar to me.
On that, the views you have taken are always great, supported in their
outlines by your facts; and though more extensive observations, and
longer continued, may produce some anomalies, yet they will probably
take their place in this first great canvass which you have sketched. In
no case, perhaps, does habit attach our choice or judgment more than
in climate. The Canadian glows with delight in his sleigh and snow,
the very idea of which gives me the shivers. The comparison of climate
between Europe and North America, taking together its corresponding
parts, hangs chiefly on three great points. 1. The changes between heat
and cold in America are greater and more frequent, and the extremes
comprehend a greater scale on the thermometer in America than in Europe.
Habit, however, prevents these from affecting us more than the smaller
changes of Europe affect the European. But he is greatly affected by
ours. 2. Our sky is always clear; that of Europe always cloudy. Hence a
greater accumulation of heat here than there, in the same parallel. 3.
The changes between wet and dry are much more frequent and sudden in
Europe than in America. Though we have double the rain, it falls in half
the time. Taking all these together, I prefer much the climate of the
United States to that of Europe. I think it a more cheerful one. It
is our cloudless sky which has eradicated from our constitutions all
disposition to hang ourselves, which we might otherwise have inherited
from our English ancestors. During a residence of between six and seven
years in Paris, I never but once saw the sun shine through a whole day,
without being obscured by a cloud in any part of it: and I never saw the
moment, in which, viewing the sky through its whole hemisphere, I could
say there was not the smallest speck of a cloud in it. I arrived at
Monticello, on my return from France, in January, and during only two
months' stay there, I observed to my daughters, who had been with me to
France, that twenty odd times within that term, there was not a speck of
a cloud in the whole hemisphere. Still I do not wonder that an European
should prefer his grey to our azure sky. Habit decides our taste in
this, as in most other cases.
The account you give of the yellow fever, is entirely agreeable to what
we then knew of it. Further experience has developed more and more
its peculiar character. Facts appear to have established, that it is
originated h
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