THE FRUIT REGIONS OF THE NORTHERN UNITED STATES AND THEIR LOCAL CLIMATES.

BY JAMES S. LIPPINCOTT, HADDONFIELD, NEW JERSEY.

THE Connection existing between the agriculture of any country and its climate is of a character too intimate to permit it to be disregarded by the cultivator. Nor has this connection ever been entirely overlooked. Man may with propriety be said to be a meteorologist by nature; so dependent is he upon the elements that to watch their changes and anticipate their disturbances becomes a necessary portion of his daily labors. Although amospheric phenomena have been subjects of interest to all classes from the earliest ages, and even in our salutations form the ever ready topic of mutual inquiry, to very recent researches are we indebted for any rational and satisfactory explanation of their general laws.

While the results of geological research are everywhere appreciated by the enlightened and even by the common mind, the deductions of the meteorologist are less widely known and held in less esteem; yet it may with truth be asserted that varieties of natural conditions arising from climate do not exert a less marked influence upon man, his labor and its products, than do the geological features of the region he inhabits.

When our British ancestors laid the foundation of the first permanent settlements on the shores of the New World, they were astonished to find themselves exposed to an intensity of winter cold far exceeding that which they had known at home in higher latitudes, or than that which was experienced in France and Italy on the same parallel as the colony they essayed to found. Nor were they prepared to expect the summers of the south of France and of northern Italy in conjunction with the winters of northern Germany and Sweden; yet such they found, and such do we experience to this day. The same want of identity of temperature on our opposite coasts prevails on the American and Asiatic shores of the Pacific ocean in temperate latitudes.

The primary cause of these differences in temperature is doubtless the diurnal rotation of the earth from west to east. The proximate cause is to be found in the presence of vast oceans between the opposite shores, and the immediate cause is the action of counter currents of warm and cold waters and their effects upon the prevailing winds which blow over them and the adjacent land. Treating cursorily of the influence of bodies of water upon the lands by which they are bounded and to which they lie in close proximity, it is not proposed to consider the origin of these great ocean currents, but to accept them as a part of the great machinery by which their waters are made to subserve a more extended and more valuable purpose in the economy of nature, and more largely to bless mankind.

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In the existence of water adjacent to land and the diverse properties of these bodies, the different parts they play in receiving and diffusing solar heat, we may find ample cause for the diversities of climate observed on both the opposite .shores of wide oceans, and in the limited regions around our inland seas. to the consideration of these phenomena exhibited upon our Atlantic coast, and upon the borders of our northern lakes, especially as they influence the capabilities of these regions for the more successful cultivation of our tender fruit, that this paper is devoted. That more enlightened views should prevail is