_Climate._--The climate of Kansas is exceptionally salubrious. Extremes of heat and cold occur, but as a rule the winters are dry and mild, while the summer heats are tempered by the perpetual prairie breezes, and the summer nights are usually cool and refreshing. The average annual temperature of the state for seventeen years preceding 1903 was 54.3 deg. F., the warmest mean being 56.0 deg., the coldest 52.6 deg. The extreme variation of yearly means throughout the east, west and middle sections during the same period was very slight, 51.6 deg. to 56.6 deg., and the greatest variation for any one section was 3.7 deg. The absolute extremes were 116 deg. and -34 deg. The dryness of the air tempers exceedingly to the senses the cold of winter and the heat of summer. The temperature over the state is much more uniform than is the precipitation, which diminishes somewhat regularly westward. In the above period of seventeen years the yearly means in the west section varied from 11.93 to 29.21 in. (av. 19.21), in the middle from 18.58 to 34.30 (av. 26.68), in the east from 26.00 to 45.71 (av. 34.78); the mean for the state ranging from 20.12 to 35.50 (av. 27.12).[1] The precipitation in the west is not sufficient for confident agriculture in any series of years, since agriculture is practically dependent upon the mean fall; a fact that has been and is of profound importance in the history of the state. The line of 20 in. fall (about the limit of certain agriculture) approximately bisects the state in dry years. The precipitation is very largely in the growing season--at Dodge the fall between April and October is 78% of that for the year. Freshets and droughts at times work havoc. The former made notable 1844 and 1858; and the latter 1860, 1874 and 1894. Tornadoes are also a not infrequent infliction, least common in the west. The years 1871, 1879, 1881 and 1892 were made memorable by particularly severe storms. There are 150 to 175 "growing days" for crops between the frosts of spring and autumn, and eight in ten days are bright with sunshine--half of them without a cloud. Winds are prevailingly from the south (in the winter often from the north-west).