Page:To the Court of the Emperor of China - vol I.djvu/39

xl In 1743 the heat was so excessive, that increasing from the 15th of July to the 25th, it raised the thermometer, that last day, to 35 degrees and a half (111⅞ of Fahrenheit). There died within that time at Pe-king eleven thousand four hundred persons, although refreshments were distributed in the streets.

In 1760 the heat killed eight thousand persons in less than two months.

Philadelphia is without doubt far from experiencing such a fatal degree of heat; but the thermometer often rises as high as 28 degrees of Reaumur (95 of Fahrenheit). In the summer the days are burning hot; they are distressing; and the nights are almost as hot as the day.

Another resemblance between the two places I am speaking of, is the sudden change in the state of the atmosphere — a change which sometimes amounts to ten or twelve degrees of Reaumur, in less than twenty-four hours, and frequently to five or six degrees in a very few hours. This variation is most frequently produced at Philadelphia by the north-west wind.

The barometer also undergoes very sudden changes at Philadelphia. I have sometimes observed there from 6 to 7 lines difference in less than as many hours.

Pe-king is then at once colder and hotter than Philadelphia; but can the opinion adopted by the inhabitants of the latter city, concerning the favourable alteration that is to take place in both seasons, be considered as well founded, after what we know of Pe-king, which notwithstanding the clearing of the land some thousand years back, still remains the same?

I am aware that it may be said that Naples and Madrid, which are nearly under the same parallel of latitude as Pe-king and Philadelphia, enjoy notwithstanding a very different temperature from that of those two cities. But I believe that we may conclude from that very circumstance, that the clearing of the land, from which alone a change of climate seems to be expected in