The nights grow cooler, although the sun shines hot in the day-time, and woe to the person, unless with an iron constitution, who disregards the change, and exposes himself or herself without additional protection, to its influence. Nature has taken care of those who depend upon her, or upon instinct, for protection. The feathers of birds and water-fowl are full; the hair and the fur are grown. Beasts and birds have been preparing for the change, and are ready when it begins. They know that the earth is changing. The shifting machinery is fast carrying south that excess of negative electricity which has so much to do with giving it its summer heat. They feel its absence, even during the day, and the contrast between that and the positively electrified northern atmosphere, which now follows every retreating wave of condensation. The musk-rat builds, of long grass and weeds, his floating nest in the pond, that he may have a place to retire to, when the rain fills it up and drives him from his burrow in its banks. But man, with all his intellect, is too heedless of the change. Additional clothing is now as necessary to him as to animals, but it is burdensome to him in the day time, and therefore he will not wear it, how much soever it would add to his comfort and safety during the night. He stands with his thin summer soles upon the changed ground, or sits in a current, or in the night air, less protected than the animals, and dysentery or fever sends him to his long home. He has _intelligence_, but he lacks _instinct_. He has time for the changes of dress which fashion may require, but none for those which atmospherical changes demand. _Fashion_ has attention in _advance_; _death_ none till _at the door_. Now the southern line of the extra-tropical belt of rains descends upon those who, living between the areas of magnetic intensity, have a dry season; and the focus of precipitation in that belt descends every where. "_Winter no come till swamps full_," the Indians told our fathers, and there is truth in the remark; although like other general truths respecting the weather, it is not always so in our climate. Rains fall during the autumnal months, as during the spring months, and while the transit of the machinery is active and the evaporation is less. And the magnetic comparative rest, and the seed time and equable "spell" of April is reproduced in the Indian summer of autumn. The machinery gradually and irresistibly descends, and with an excess of polar positive electricity, comes snow; Boreas controls, and winter sets in, reaching its maximum of cold in January again. Remembering, then, the differences in the normal conditions of the seasons and months, and the different characters that the winds, and storms, and clouds, and other phenomena bear in them respectively, let us now look at the signs of foul or fair weather not herein before fully stated, upon which practical reliance may be placed.