the valleys. The jack-snipe is very local in its likes and will return again and again to the same spot; in ordinary seasons its numbers are about equal to those of the common species. It lies well to the gun, often until almost trodden on, and birds have been known to have been picked up from before the nose of a dog. It is more easily killed than any of its congeners, for although it flies in a zig-zag manner it invariably rises right from the feet of the sportsman. About April, the birds congregate for their journey northwards, and there is no authentic record of the species having bred in Britain. Mr. John Wolley, an English naturalist, discovered in Lapland the first known eggs of the jack-snipe. And this is how he relates the interesting find :-"We had not been many hours in the marsh when I saw a bird get up, and I marked it down. The nest was found. A sight of the eggs, as they lay untouched, raised my expectations to the highest pitch. I went to the spot where I had marked the bird, and put it up again, and again saw it, after a short low flight, drop suddenly into cover. Once more it rose a few feet from where it had settled. I fired; and in a minute had in my hand a true jack-snipe, the undoubted parent of the nest of eggs! In the course of the day and night I found three more nests, and examined the birds of each. One allowed me to touch it with my hand before it rose, and another only got up when my foot was within six inches of it. The nest of June 17, and the two of June 18, were all alike in structure, made loosely of dried pieces of grass and equisetum not at all woven together, with a few old leaves of the dwarf birch, placed in a dry sedgy or grassy spot close to more open swamp."

At one time snipe were commonly taken in England in "pantles" made of twisted horsehair. These were set about three inches from the ground; and snipe and teal were mostly taken in them. In preparing the snares the fowler trampled a strip of oozy ground, until, in the darkness, it had the appearance of a narrow plash The birds were taken as they went to feed in ground presumably containing food of which they were fond.

water.

JOHN WATSON

THE

THE BRITISH CLIMATE.

HERE are few subjects on which people are, as a rule, more imperfectly informed than on the weather. Why should this be? for meteorology has great practical uses, and in addition to the curious facts which its study discloses, and which should interest the thoughtful, there is hardly anything on which it is more incumbent that medical men, at any rate, should have correct information for the guidance of their clients. Only a few weeks ago I saw in what purported to be a scientific periodical, edited by a metropolitan physician of some eminence, a paragraph which stated that the shaded thermometer in summer reached 140° F. in Canada, and in the winter fell"all the time" to 13° below zero. Canada is a large country, but 100° is a very high reading in any part of the Dominion. At Montreal in 1875, according to the official report of the Chief Signal Officer of the United States' Army, the maximum was 87°, and the minimum 22.1°, but readings over 75° and below zero were rare ; at Port Stanley the highest in the same year was 81°, and in 1876 90°, while the mercury only six times fell below zero; at Quebec a maximum of 85° was only once reached; at Saugeen 86°, with a minimum of 8′1°; at Toronto 88° was once reached in 1875, but this was unusual, and the thermometer rarely exceeded 80°. The Dominion of Canada is a vast empire, and in many districts the winter cold is intense and continuous, still the foregoing figures show that the thermometer never reaches 140°, while, on the other hand, the older and more thickly inhabited regions have not a mean winter temperature of -13°, but one at least twenty degrees above. Quebec is cold enough all will admit, but its January mean is 12° above zero. "Figures," says Sir William Butler, "convey but a poor idea of cold, yet they are the only means we have, and by a comparison of figures some persons, at least, will understand the cold of an Athabascan winter. The citadel of Quebec has the reputation of being a cold winter residence; its mean temperature for the month of January is 11° 7' F., but the mean temperature of the month of January 1844 at Fort Chipeweyan was -22° 74', or over 30° colder; and during the preceding month-December-the wind blew with a total pressure

It is perhaps needless to say When scientific papers are in

of 1,160 pounds to the square foot. more about an Athabascan winter." accurate it is not surprising to find educated people, who do not profess to be scientific, making still more stupid blunders. A Wiltshire rector told me that he thought nothing of 120° F. in his parish, nor of zero. He might as well have said that the Wilts men ranged from three to ten feet in height. Few people in England understand what a minimum of 10° or a maximum of 90° really does signify, and they would be none the worse for a little information. I shall endeavour to compress into as brief a compass as possible some facts which will be new to many of my readers, but on which they can rely.

We have been passing, since the beginning of September 1887, through a time of almost continuously low temperature, with heavy rain to begin with, then a long drought, then again abnormal rain, but finally some months with the temperature above the mean. Into the cause of this state of things I need not enter, nor would it be easy to frame a good explanation.

The following summary of the weather of the past year in the neighbourhood of the Metropolis will come in appropriately at this time; I have greatly abridged it from official reports. It gives the salient features of 1888, and shows the compensation which, as I shall point out later, obtains in the weather between the deficit of one season and the excess of another. Last year was not eventful for the occurrence of exceptional meteorological phenomena, and it was particularly free from wind-storms, and, beyond the persistent low temperature and copious rainfall during the summer, little of moment occurred; yet, from a meteorological point of view, it was not uninteresting. The absence of warmth until the latter part of the autumn, and the very small amount of sunshine, rendered the year dreary and the weather unusually depressing. In the earlier months the scarcity of water caused considerable apprehension, as the British supply mainly depends upon the autumn and winter rainfall, which had been greatly below the average. The heavy summer rains changed the whole aspect of things, the fall being sufficiently heavy to find ready access to the springs, and the total absence of warm, sunny days allowed the ground to remain soddened. Whilst in England we were enjoying quiet weather at the beginning of last year, very different conditions obtained in other parts of the Northern Hemisphere. In New York on March 12 a memorable snowstorm occurred, which was a blizzard of the true American type, the storm being so severe as to paralyse trade, and seventy-five trains were blocked in the snow within a radius of fifty miles. In ten

minutes the thermometer fell thirty-four degrees Centigrade, or 61° F., while the wind rose to hurricane strength. When the streets were cleared of snow many corpses of men and women were found huddled in doorways or under any shelter. Mr. Abercromby, in his work on weather, mentions that in every blizzard a very curious circumstance attends these deaths in almost every case the victims are found to have begun to strip themselves. When the body is nearly reduced to an icicle only a very little blood continues to circulate languidly through the brain. Then delirium sets in with a delusive sensation of warmth, under the influence of which the traveller begins to divest himself of his clothes. The summer conditions over England were, as so often happens here, less agreeable than in Europe generally, and instead of summer we had once more an intermittent kind of spring. While we were experiencing a deluge and sunless days, the northern parts of Europe were having an exceptionally fine summer, and in Norway and Sweden the weather was finer than for years, although vessels plying in sub-arctic waters reported that ice was unusually abundant, and was fallen in with much farther south than usual.

The subjoined table, drawn up from observations published by the Meteorological Office, gives the principal elements of the weather in London in 1888:

month, the thermometer did not exceed 72°, a reading surpassed by 2o in September, and by 4° in May, and almost equalled in October. The lowest reading was 20° in February, and frost was registered in the shade in every month from January to April, and from October to December, whilst in July the thermometer fell to 43°. The range of temperature was very large for London in May and October, reaching 42°, but in July it was exceedingly small, being only 29° The total range for the year was 65°, or 8° less than in 1887, but in fair agreement with the average of recent years. The mean temper ture was below the average in seven months, in agreement with it in two, and above in three, while the yearly mean was 1° colder than usual. The persistent character of the cold is shown by the fact that during the three years, 1886-88, only eight months have had a mean temperature in excess of the average.

The largest monthly rainfall occurred in July, the excess amcunting to 362 in., and very heavy falls were recorded in March and in November. The smallest monthly fall was in May; but there was a large deficiency in January, September, and October. The total fall for the year near London was 2'24 in. in excess of the average.

Mr. G. J. Symons, F.R.S., our greatest living authority on the British rainfall, published, a short time ago, an able résumé of the rainfall; this I have freely abridged, though retaining its principal features. Mr. Symons remarks that the first question generally asked is, "Was 1888 a wet or a dry year?" It was decidedly a dry year measured by the total rainfall, and taking the United Kingdom as a whole, excepting over the south-east of Ireland and a strip running due west from London to the Bristol Channel, every record examined gives a total under the average of 1870-79, and in many cases the deficiency is large; this is shown by the following table:

STATIONS AT WHICH THE TOTAL RAINFALL IN 1888 WAS MORE THAN FIVE INCHES BELOW THE AVERAGE OF 1870-79.