The Mediterranean shores of America : Southern California : its climatic, physical, and meteorological conditions / by P.C. Remondino.

Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Mediterranean shores of America : Southern California : its climatic, physical, and meteorological conditions / by P.C. Remondino. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    PREFACE. Climate is a wonderful as well as a powerful factor— be it in religion, arts, sciences, or civilization. It makes morality and creeds; the wild and weird mysteries of Eulesis, the festivals of the Roman Flora, or the orgies that accompanied the feasts and worship of Dionysius or Bacchus, never could have taken place except between certain degrees of latitude. Climate determines the diet, occupation, the diseases of which we shall suffer and die, as well as the average length of our existence; it determines our temper, faculties, and facilities for ac- quiring knowledge and the arts. Climate is, in fact, as observed by Montesquieu, the most powerful of all em- pires. We need but observe the effects of the American climate on Europeans, and of the European climate on the Americans, to become convinced of the truth of this assertion. Southern California climatology is quite a study ; many of its meteorological results are even real puzzles, —^puzzles met with nowhere else. It has many oddi- ties ; for instance, one of the greatest peculiarities or oddities of this climate consists in the relative condi- tions existing between the degrees of temperature and the degrees of atmospheric humidity. It is this atmos- pheric condition that puzzles all new-comers, and that is incomprehensible to the average observer of meteorologi- cal conditions and their results. As a medical visitor once observed to the writer, Nature has evidently fitted Southern California meteorology with such a nice self- adjusting regulator that climatic accidents to health