The Riviera : sketches of the health resorts of the north Mediterranean coast of France and Italy from Hyères to Spezia : with chapters on the general meteorology of the district, its medical aspect and value, etc. / by Edward I. Sparks.
- Sparks, Edward I. (Edward Isaac), 1843-1880
- Date:
- 1879
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The Riviera : sketches of the health resorts of the north Mediterranean coast of France and Italy from Hyères to Spezia : with chapters on the general meteorology of the district, its medical aspect and value, etc. / by Edward I. Sparks. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
46/424 page 30
![over Europe, at Mentone ; and he afterwards expressed himself as follows :— What we endured, however, from the intermittent cold of the season 1869—70 was not for a moment to be compared to what was experienced at home. And this is the way to estimate a wintering at Mentone [or elsewhere on the Riviera]. We have to think, not so much of what we have enjoyed as what we have escaped.''^ After all, this is no unfavorable estimate of the climate of a region that can be reached from London in thirty- six hours. Perhaps some of my readers may be inclined to ask whether we can at all predict the character, say, of the coming season on the Riviera. All I can answer is that, until we can foretell the weather over the whole of Europe, we cannot even make a tolerable guess as to what will happen in any particular part of that great area. We can only broadly say that the peculiarities of the Riviera climate, already described, will exist, with more or less modification, next winter and the winter after, but we cannot tell at all what the amount of modification will be one way or the other. Sir J. Herschel, in his ' Familiar Lectures on Scientific Subjects ' (Lecture lY, The Weather and Weather Prophets, p. 146), said, several years ago, that no person in his senses would alter his plan of conduct for six months in advance in the most trifling particular, on the faith of any special predic- tion of a warm or a cold, a wet or a dry, a calm or a stormy summer or winter. And though a winter in the ' Times ^ (September 25th, 1878), in a most careful essay on some recent storms, expresses his belief, with reference to this passage, that predic- tions of this kind may be regarded as well within the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21078658_0046.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
