Rough Ways Made Smooth: A series of familiar essays on scientific subjectsProctor, Richard A. (Richard Anthony)
Science
Rough Ways Made Smooth: A series of familiar essays on scientific subjects
Proctor, Richard A. (Richard Anthony)
Science
At Strasburg, on December 31, a temperature of fifteen degrees below
zero was shown. At Berlin on the 20th, and St. Petersburg on the 12th,
temperatures of twenty and twenty-three degrees below zero respectively
were noted. But in Poland and parts of Germany an even greater degree
of cold was recorded. For instance, at Warsaw, 26-1/2 degrees below
zero; and at Bremen thirty-two degrees. At Basle, on December 18, the
thermometer indicated nearly thirty-six degrees below zero. In the
district around Toulouse bread was frozen so hard that it could not be
cut till it had been laid before the fire. Many travellers perished in
the snow. At Lemburg, in Galicia, thirty-seven persons were found dead
in three days towards the end of December. The ice froze so thick in
ponds that in most of them all the fish were killed.
The winter of 1794-95 was remarkable in this country as giving the
lowest average temperature for a month ever recorded in England. The
mean temperature for January, 1795, was only 26.5 degrees; or more
than three degrees lower than that of last January. January 25, 1795,
is commonly supposed to have been the coldest day ever known. The
thermometer in London stood at eight degrees below zero during part of
that bitter day; and in Paris, where also there were six consecutive
weeks of frost, at 10-3/7 degrees below zero. The Thames was frozen
over at Whitehall in the beginning of January. The Marne, the Scheldt,
the Rhine, and the Seine were so frozen over that army corps and heavy
carriages crossed over them. Perhaps the strangest of all the recorded
results of cold weather occurred during the same month. The French
General Pichegru, who was then operating in the North of Holland, sent
detachments of cavalry and infantry about January 20, with orders to
the former to cross the Texel and to capture the enemy's vessels, which
were 'imprisoned by the ice.' 'The French horsemen crossed the plains
of ice at full gallop,' we are told, 'approached the vessels, called on
them to surrender, captured them without a struggle, and took the crews
prisoners:' probably the only occasion in history when effective use
could have been made of a corps of horse-marines.
The winter of 1798-99 was very cold, but not so exceptionally cold
in England as on the Continent. The Seine was completely frozen over
from the 29th of December to the 19th of January, from the Pont de la
Tournelle to the Pont Royal. Farther east the cold was much greater.
The Meuse was frozen over so thickly that carriages could cross it, and
at the Hague and at Rotterdam fairs were held on the river. A regiment
of dragoons starting from Mayence, crossed the Rhine upon the ice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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