Note 430 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN. (continued 2)

This astounding proposition was in the early days of the settlement not peculiar to Morton. Higginson, in his New Englands Plantation, speaks of the “extraordinary clear and dry air, that is of a most healing nature to all such as are of a cold, melancholy, phlegmatic, rheumatic temper of body,” and concludes what he has to say on the subject with his often-quoted sentiment that “a sup of New-England’s air is better than a whole draught of Old England’s ale.” (Young’s Chron. of Mass., pp. 251-2.) Williams, too, says in his Key (ch. xiii.): “The Nor-West wind (which occasioneth New-England cold) comes over the cold frozen Land, and over many millions of Loads of Snow: and yet the pure wholesomnesse of the Aire is wonderfull, and the warmth of the Sunne, such in the sharpest weather, that I have often seen the Natives Children runne about starke naked in the coldest dayes.” Again, in the pamphlet entitled New England’s First Fruits, printed in London in 1643, it was stated, in reply to the objection of extreme winter cold, that “the cold there is no impediment to health, but very wholsome for our bodies, insomuch that all sorts generally, weake and strong, had scarce ever such measure of health in all their lives as there.... Men are seldome troubled in winter with coughes and Rheumes.” (I. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 249.) Josselyn, however, writing nearly thirty years later, remarks: “Some of our New-England writers affirm that the English are never, or very rarely, heard to sneeze or cough, as ordinarily they do in England, which is not true.” (Two Voyages, p. 184.)