Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/393

Rh styled in the slang of to-day "land boomers." "New England's Prospects" was one of these, and it drew a comparison at the expense of the Virginia region with the hope, no doubt, of inducing families to come over and settle. Wood says:

In another place the same writer says:

There has been considerable speculation on the subject of climatic influence in the moulding of an "American type." The moist climate of England presents a marked contrast with the drier continental winds of the region east of the Rocky Mountains, and a certain change in the physical type, since the settlement of the country is undoubtedly a fact. Unfortunately, however, there are no exact data and we are still left in the lurch with only our theories. No doubt the American atmosphere by virtue of the "cold wave" possesses a higher electrical potential and a more drying effect upon the tissues than does the atmosphere of Great Britain and western Europe. This may increase nerve tension, though it is by no means clear in just what way the American climate has altered the European type. The different effect of landscape, which is largely a matter of atmosphere, must have influenced the European mind in some degree, at least in accentuating the idea of greater expanse. The contrast between the sky of England and that of America assuredly is most striking. The English sky has the appearance of being less wind-swept, and the sunshine has the quality of having been sifted through cloudy vapors much more obviously than the sky in America. This has the effect of softening or toning down the outlines of the typical English landscape, at the same time making the sky seem more imminent. In the American sky there is less of this apparent nearness; more of what Lowell would call the "emancipating spaces." These landscape and sky effects, at the same time exist largely in the eye of the beholder. It seems to be a habit of mind to interpret the facts of nature in terms of one's own sense impressions—to see things, as it were, through temperamental glasses.

The early settlers found spring invading this new land—creeping up river valleys, touching the meadows and woods with its young green—and the farmer still finds spring invading this homeland of the Atlantic slope through the valleys of the Susquehanna, Delaware,