very wet and cold, the thermometer seldom rising above 45°; but towards the close of the spring (May) it suddenly becomes sultry, the thermometer reaching as high as 95°. This sudden transition produces among the inhabitants fever and ague, congestive and jungle fever, while vegetation makes but little progress.

In summer the ordinary range of the thermometer is from 95° to 105°, but it frequently touches 125°, when the rapid progress that vegetation makes appears almost supernatural; and the sun, by imparting vitality to every species of filth on the surface of the earth, fills the air with innumerable tribes of insects, whose existence renders life an intolerable burthen. This season also brings its epidemics, yellow and bilious fevers.*

In autumn the thermometer falls gradually until it reaches 60 degrees, and the weather becomes more congenial for a short time, when the autumnal rains or rainy season sets in, and continues all through the winter and greater part of the spring, accompanied by awful thunder, lightning, and northerly winds, which search the frame with an indescribable acuteness.

The baneful influence of these sudden transitions of the atmosphere on the animal, is only equalled by their destructive influence on the vegetable family that covers the face of the earth, which is

*The yellow fever carried off 65 per cent of the population of eastern Texas in 1839.

as rich as any in the world; but every thing it produces, whether planted by nature or the hand of man, is no sooner above ground than it is matured, and vanishes as if by some convulsive effort of nature. The flowers on the prairies are of a single day's creation, showing themselves in all their primitive and exquisite beauty in the evening; but the next day's sun reduces them to a cinder, or inundates them with water, which varies in depth (during the rainy season) from eighteen inches to four, and in some places eight feet. At the close of this season these waters do not disappear; on the contrary, in April the sun comes forth with great power, and its action on the snow that covers the mountains in the north causes similar inundations in the valleys which intersect the mountainous regions, whence the waters thus produced are in a great measure confined or backed up by a strong south south-easterly wind which prevails, (with the sun at this season,) aided by the waters that fall during the rainy season: but the latter no sooner begin to retire, hurried by a strong northerly wind, than the mountain valleys pour forth their torrents, not unfrequently sweeping every thing before them, but never failing to continue the inundation

* "The New York Sun reports that there have been great floods in Texas. The rivers had swollen to a great height. People were obliged to climb trees to escape from drowning. The weather was, however, intensely cold, and ice and drift wood prevented the navigation of the streams."--From the Jamaica Morning Journal of March 10th, 1841.

of the lower country from about the 1st of April to the middle of May, when the rivers of Texas, which at other seasons are particularly narrow and shallow, rise, overflow their banks, and so spread their waters to collect the annual deposits of decomposed vegetable matter on the prairies, and the loose timber of the forest, with which they subsequently return to their former course, thence dashing onward with astonishing rapidity for their common destination, the Gulf of Mexico, into which they discharge themselves, together with an immense body of drift timber and decomposed vegetable matter collected as above described, and which they carry on their surface for hundreds of miles through the interior of the country.

The temperature of the waters, at this season, is never less than 20 degrees below the temperature of the water produced by the rains, and at all times 40 degrees below the temperature of the atmosphere, and thus the energy of the animal family, and of all vegetation, is completely paralyzed.

But it is asserted that "draining" will remedy all this; such is not the case, for if the low lands were drained (admitting for a moment that it were practicable) so as to carry the water off the surface, the sub-soil must be cut into, and being thus drained, would lose the moisture it now retains, and which alone supports the vegetation on the surface through the summer months, that are invariably intensely hot and dry.

Again, we are told by the romantic tourists and needy speculators, who have visited Texas, that these obstacles are not met with in the upper or western part of Texas; but although they are ignorant of the physical formation of the climate and soil of that country, they are not ignorant of the fact, that all the finest part of Texas is still in the absolute possession of various tribes of Indians, amounting in all to about 80,000, who can never be brought under the Texan yoke; and if they should by any chapter of chances be exterminated, their place will be immediately supplied by other and more formidable tribes from the state of Arkansas, whence all the tribes that have emigrated from the valley of the Mississippi, for the last thirty years, are now located, and concentrating all their strength.

Having given a description of the climate of Texas, from personal observation, for the truth of which I hold myself responsible to the reader, it will be readily admitted that I am justly entitled to expose the errors into which other writers have fallen on this subject. Indeed, I deem it a duty so to do, as the obvious tendency of every line that has been written on Texas is to seduce people to emigrate to the inhospitable swamps of that country.

Mrs. Holley, a fair American authoress, who gives the most romantic, seductive, and extravagant account of Texas, says, when speaking of the climate,

page 42,"indeed, the severe heat of the summer season, when the average range of the thermometer is 85 degrees, would render it quite uncomfortable and unhealthy were it not for the refreshing breezes from the south, which blow almost without intermission." But towards the close of the same paragraph she (in one of those contradictions, with which her work is replete throughout) states, "The temperature, however, depends, at all times, greatly upon the REGULAR WINDS, WHOSE CHANGES Sometimes cause it to vary 40 degrees in twenty-four hours." And again she says, page 43, "But it must not be supposed that there are no cold days in Texas, nor exceptions to the general course of things. Within the last FEW YEARS, which have been signalized by winters EXCESSIVELY COLD everywhere, the weather has been so severe in Louisiana, as well as Texas, that all the young orange trees were killed, and the old ones injured; and much of the cane injured."

But Mrs. Holley's spirit of contradiction does not rest here, for in page 44 she asserts, "The climate [of Texas] is, in truth, very similar to that of Louisiana, but modified by so many favourable circumstances, [the frequent vast and sudden transitions of the temperature of the atmosphere from 85 to 40 degrees] as to possess all the genial influences [not forgetting the destruction of young and old orange trees, cane, &c.] of the latter, while it avoids its attendant evils;" which she describes as "fever and ague," and then continues thus, page 45: