This is in latitude 57° 3′ north, and is found by comparison to be four degrees warmer than the average of Portland, Me., or six degrees warmer than the temperature of Quebec, Canada. The average winter is milder, therefore, at Sitka than it is at Boston, however singular the assertion may at first strike us, in connection with the commonly entertained idea of this northwestern Territory. The mean winter temperature of Sitka and Newport, R. I., are very nearly the same, and there is only a difference of six degrees in their mean yearly temperature, though there is a difference of sixteen degrees of latitude. We have before us a printed letter which appeared in the “Philadelphia Press,” signed by Mr. C. F. Fowler, late an agent of the Alaska Fur Company, who has resided for twelve years in Alaska, in which he says: “You who live in the States look upon this country as a land of perpetual ice and snow, yet I grew in my garden last year, at Kodiak, abundant crops of radishes, lettuce, carrots, onions, cauliflowers, cabbages, peas, turnips, potatoes, beets, parsnips, and celery. Within five miles of this garden was one of the largest glaciers in Alaska.” In a certain sense it is surely a country of paradoxes. The harbor of Sitka is never closed by ice, which cannot be truthfully said of Boston or New York. Dr. Sheldon Jackson, long resident in the Territory as United States general agent of education for Alaska, tells us that the temperature of Sitka and that of Richmond, Va., are nearly identical. Mr. McLean of the United States Signal Service, who has been located at Sitka for several years, says, “the climate of southern Alaska is the most equable I ever experienced.” There is in Alaska a very large section of country, composed of islands and the mainland, where the average temperature is higher than at Christiania, capital of Norway, or Stockholm, capital of Sweden,—where the winters are milder and the fall of rain and snow is less than in southern Scandinavia, which is the geographical counterpart of Alaska in the opposite hemisphere. Sitka harbor is no more subject to arctic temperature than is Chesapeake Bay. “It must be a fastidious person,” said Mr. Seward in his speech upon Alaska, “who complains of a climate in which, while the eagle delights to soar, the hummingbird does not disdain to flutter.” If it is sometimes misty and foggy on the coast, it is not so to a greater extent than is the case during a large portion of the year in the cities of London and Liverpool.