ivers run more or less to the
southeast, and increase the winds which blow from the northwest, while
the great bed of the Mississippi exerts an equal influence in augmenting
the number and steadiness of the winds which blow over it from the
southwest; and there is another cause of difference in climate, chiefly
perceptible, first, in the temperature, which, if no counteracting cause
existed, they would raise in the west considerably above that of
corresponding latitudes in the east; and, secondly, in the moisture of
the two regions, which is generally greater west than east of the
mountains, when the southwest wind prevails; as, much of the water with
which it comes charged from the Gulf of Mexico, is deposited before it
reaches the country east of the Alleghanies."--_Dr. Drake._

It is an error that our climate is more variable, or the summers
materially hotter, than in a correspondent latitude in the Atlantic
states. "The New Englander and New Yorker north of the mountains of West
Point, should bear in mind that his migration is not to the _West_ but
_South West_; and as necessarily brings him into a warmer climate, as
when he seeks the shores of the Delaware, Potomac, or James' River."

The settlers from Virginia to Kentucky, or those from Maryland and
Pennsylvania to Ohio, or further west, have never complained of hotter
summers than they had found in the land from whence they came.

To institute a comparative estimate of temperature between the east and
the west, we must observe: first, the thermometer; and, secondly, the
flowering of trees, the putting forth of vegetation, and the ripening of
fruits and grain in _correspondent latitudes_. This has not usually been
done. Philadelphia and Cincinnati approach nearer to the same parallel,
than any other places where such observations have been made.
Cincinnati, however, is about 50' south of Philadelphia. The following
remarks are from Dr. Daniel Drake of Cincinnati, to whose pen the west
is much indebted.

"From a series of daily observations in Cincinnati or its vicinity, for
eight consecutive years, the mean annual temperature has been
ascertained to be 54 degrees and a quarter. Dr. Rush states the mean
temperature of Philadelphia at 52 degrees and a half; Dr. Coxe, from six
years' observations, at 54 deg. and a sixth; and Mr. Legaux, from
seventeen years' observations, at Spring Mill, a few miles out of the
city, at 53 deg. and a third; the mean term of which r