“A change in climate is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are becoming much more moderate within the memory of even the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep. They do not often lie below the mountains more than one, two, or three days, and very rarely a week. The snows are remembered to have been more frequent, deep, and of long continuance. The elderly inform me that the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year.” But Jefferson and his neighbors were mistaken. Never during the period of authentic history has the snow covered the ground in Virginia an average of three months per year, or three months for a single year. These old inhabitants were like those of to-day, who remember only the abnormalities of climate of twenty-five or fifty years ago, and in comparing the unusual conditions of long ago with the average of the present time they are deceived. I have known intelligent and well-meaning persons to declare that they knew from personal recollection that the climate of their particular places of residence had changed since they were young; that they had stable landmarks to show that the streams were drying up, the rainfall growing less, and the winters becoming milder, notwithstanding the fact that carefully taken observations of temperature and rainfall for each day for over one hundred years right at their places of abode showed no change in climate. We have a continuous daily record for one hundred years at New Bedford, Massachusetts, nearly as long records at several other places, and numerous records for over half a century. From these we learn that there has been no definite change in climate in this country during the past hundred years. There have been variations, such as an excess or a deficiency of rainfall over a considerable area, that have persisted for several years at a time; but in each case the conditions would ultimately come back to normal, or more often to an extreme of the opposite tendency to what had obtained immediately before. In sections where the rainfall in bountiful years is barely sufficient for good crops, the people in the past have been prone to consider that the amount that they receive during the periods of excess is that which normally is due them, and thus to be unprepared for the dry periods that statistics tell us must certainly come. The matter of change of climate is most important to our sub-arid West,—to the western parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Some years ago, when the tide of emigration was strong into these regions, there were several years of more than the average rainfall. The coming of population and the coming of extra rainfall were accidentally coincident, but that fact was probably responsible for the popular belief that civilization brings an increase in precipitation; that the breaking of the virgin soil, making it more permeable to the absorption of