People who never travel far from their own homes usually cherish quite erroneous ideas regarding the climates of distant lands. It is hard for most Americans to realize, for example, that the Isthmus of Panama, in the heart of the tropics, never experiences temperatures nearly so high as those which occur every summer in the United States. A citizen of South Dakota, where the mercury, in the shade, frequently rises above 100° Fahr., and has been known to reach 115°, will be inclined to revise his definition of the term “tropical” when he learns that at Colon, the Atlantic terminus of the Canal, a temperature as high as 90° is decidedly exceptional, and that the maximum reading during a period of six years was only 92°. In thirteen years Canal Zone vital statistics showed only two deaths from sunstroke and twenty-one non-fatal cases of heat prostration among a population of 120,000. It will also surprise most Americans to learn that the highest natural air temperatures that have been recorded anywhere on earth were not observed near the equator, but in a California desert. At a place on the edge of Death Valley, rejoicing in the ironical name of Greenland Ranch, a temperature of 134° Fahr. was registered in July, 1913. The thermometer which furnished this remarkable reading was a tested instrument, installed in a standard screen over an alfalfa sod, and not exposed to the reflected heat of the desert. At the same place the temperature reached 100° or more on 548 days in four years. Outside of the United States the highest temperature ever recorded at a meteorological station was 127° Fahr. at Wargla (Ouargla), Algeria. The lowest temperatures encountered by polar explorers are considerably higher than those experienced each winter by the inhabitants of northern Siberia. The “record,” so far as instrumental observations go, is held by the town of Verkhoyansk, at which the temperature fell to 90° below zero (Fahrenheit) in February, 1892. Strange to say, this “winter cold pole” of the earth has warm summers. At Verkhoyansk the temperature sometimes rises to 80° above zero, or higher. At Yakutsk, Siberia, the thermometer has been known to fall to 84° below zero in winter and to rise 102° above zero in summer; a range of temperature exceeding the interval between the freezing point and the boiling point of water! Another climatic paradox is that experienced by mountaineers who, in scaling peaks mantled in eternal snow, often suffer with the heat, on account of the intensity of solar radiation in the pure, dry air of high altitudes. At the health resort of Davos, in the high Alps (altitude 5,250 feet), invalids sit out-of-doors without wraps in midwinter, and, indeed, are sometimes driven into the shade to escape the too ardent rays of the sun. At the same time the temperature of the air itself may be far below freezing, and the ground covered with snow.