The winter of 1819-20 was bitter throughout Europe. Mr. Thomas Plant, in an interesting letter to the _Times_ of February 4, says that this winter was one long spell of intense frost from November to March, and was almost as severe as that of 1813-14. In Paris there were forty-seven days of frost, nineteen of which were consecutive, from December 30, 1818, to January 17. 'In France,' says Flammarion, 'the intensity of the cold was heralded by the passage along the coast of the Pas de Calais of a great number of birds coming from the farthest regions of the north by wild swans and ducks of variegated plumage. Several travellers perished of cold; amongst others a farmer near Arras, a gamekeeper near Nogent (Haute Marne) a man and woman in the Côte d'Or, two travellers at Breuil, on the Meuse, a woman and a child on the road from Etain to Verdun, six persons near Château Salins (Meurthe), and two little Savoyards on the road from Clermont to Chalons-sur-Saône. In the experiments made at the Metz School of Artillery, on the 10th of January, to ascertain how iron resisted low temperatures, several soldiers had their hands or their ears frozen.' During this winter the Thames, the Seine, the Rhône, the Rhine, the Danube, the Garonne, the lagoons of Venice, and the Sound, were so far frozen that it was possible to walk across them on the ice. The winter of 1829-30 was remarkable as the longest winter of the first half of the present century. The cold was not exceptionally intense, but the long continuance of bitter weather occasioned more mischief in the long run than has attended short spells of severer cold. The river Seine was frozen at Paris first for twenty-nine days, from December 28th to January 26th, and then for five days from February 5th to February 10th. The river had not been so many days frost-bound in any winter since 1763. Even at Havre the Seine was frozen over; and at Rouen a fair was held upon the river on January 18th. On January 25, after a thaw of six days, the ice from Corbeil and Melun blocked up the bridge at Choisy, forming a wall 16-1/2 feet high. The winter of 1837-38 was remarkable for the long frost of January and February, 1838. It lasted eight weeks. Mr. Plant mentions that 'the lowest point of the thermometer during this long and severe frost occurred on January 20, when the readings were from 5 degrees below zero, in this district' (Moseley, near Birmingham), 'to 8 and 10 degrees below zero in more exposed aspects.' 'On the 13th of January, the old Royal Exchange, London, was destroyed by fire; and the frost was so great that, when the fire brigade had ceased playing on one portion of the burning pile, the water in a short time became icicles of such large dimensions, that the effect has been described as grand in the extreme.'