“The average temperature of Land’s End is 40 degrees. Well, that may not strike you as a contrast so sharp as to warrant my dire prediction, but you must learn to see in average temperatures much more than is simply indicated in the mere differences in degrees. Averages are utterly misleading, so far as they mean habitable conditions. A temperature of 0 for six months, and a temperature of 80 degrees, for the remaining six months furnishes the harmless average of 40 degrees, but a land suffering from the affliction of a climate such as that, would be useless for the larger purposes of a civilized community. Averages produce an impression of uniformity, whereas they conceal the most obstreperous changes--and a small difference, such as you observe between the temperature of the Scilly islands, and these inclement and impossible districts of Canada or Kamtchatka, means that though all are on the same latitude, they are as diversely adapted for modern life as the tropics and the north pole. Why are the Scilly islands adapted for tulips and spring peas, when Manitoba yet sleeps in snow? “From the point of view of a primary instruction in temperature, hottest at the equator, coldest at the pole, and graded all the way between; it is a preposterous caprice. It is a caprice. And a civilization flourishing under the auspices of a caprice, will come to grief. Climate is a symbol of vagaries, contradictions and sudden affinities. It is the atmospheric expression for the feminine and the poetic in men. As a matter of fact contingencies of interfering land surfaces, of changing barometric pressure, of oceanic tides, of air currents, of solar radiation, combine into a labyrinth of possibilities to make places that ought to be cold, hot, and vice versa.