mountains, most of which have been active volcanoes, and are now covered, some with snow, and some with forests. 3. It is laced with large bodies of water, appearing more like seas than lakes; it is dotted with innumerable villages, and estates, and plantations; eminences rise from it, which, elsewhere, would be called mountains, yet there, at your feet, they seem but ant-hills on the plain; and now, letting your eye follow the rise of the mountains to the west (near fifty miles distant), you look over the immediate summits that wall the valley to another and more distant range, and to range beyond range, with valleys between each, until the whole melts into a vapory distance, blue as the cloudless sky above you. 4. I could have gazed for hours at this little world, while the sun and passing vapor checkered the fields, and, sailing off again, left the whole one bright mass of verdure and water, bringing out clearly the domes of the village churches studding the plain or leaning against the first slopes of the mountains, with the huge lakes looming larger in the rarefied atmosphere." 5. Yet one thing was wanting. Over the immense expanse there seemed scarce an evidence of life. There were no figures in the picture. It lay torpid in the sunlight, like some deserted region, where Nature again was beginning to assert her empire,vast, solitary, and melancholy. There were no sails, no steamers on the lakes, no smoke over the villages, no people at labor in the fields, no horsemen, coaches, or travellers, but ourselves. 6. The silence was almost supernatural. It was a picture of "still life," inanimate in every feature, save where, on the distant mountain sides, the fire of some poor coal-burner mingled its blue wreath with the bluer sky, or the tinkle of the bell of a solitary mulëteer was heard from among the dark and solemn pines. BRANTZ MAYER. XCIV. - THE WORLD OF WATER. 1. WATER expands when warmed; in pots it boils over; and although the ocean certainly is nowhere hot enough to boil a leg of mutton, the great mass of water rises under the influence of tropic heat above the common level, and runs over towards the poles, leaving its place empty for cold water to rush in and occupy it. Precisely in the same way, air, which is another an ocean some fifty miles deep, and at the bottom of which we are living, swells at the equator, and pours out its deluge north and south over the colder current which runs in to ocean, -- take advantage of the vacancy, and warm itself. When warm it will also get up. That is one fact; another modifies it. 2. The earth rolls on its axis. If you stick a knitting-needle through the centre of an orange, and rotate the orange on the needle, then you see a model of the earth rotating on its axis. The needle comes out of the north pole above, and out of the south pole below; and, if you scratch a line all round the orange, half-way between pole and pole, that is the imagined line called the Equator. Now, take two little pins; stick one of them on the equator, and another in the neighborhood of either pole; set the orange now revolving like the globe itself, from west to east, and make precisely one revolution. In the same space of time one pin has travelled through a great space, you perceive; all around the orange, as it were; while the pin near the pole has had a very tiny journey to perform, and on the pole itself would absolutely not revolve at all. 3. So, then, upon this world of ours, everything on or near the equator spins round in the twenty-four hours far more rapidly than anything placed near the poles. But everything partakes in the movement, as you share in your body the movement of a railway-train; let the train stop suddenly, your body travels on and throws you violently forward. So air and water, flowing from the equator in great currents, because they cannot at once accommodate themselves to the slower movement of the earth as they approach the poles, retain their own motive propensity, and shoot on eastward still, as well as north and south. The slow trains coming up from the poles are outstripped by the rapid movement of the earth below, and, being unable to accommodate themselves to it readily, they lag behind and fall into a westward course. 4. By this movement of the earth, therefore, a transverse direction is communicated to the great equatorial and polar currents, whether of air or of water. Furthermore, local peculiarities, arrangements of islands and continents, plain and mountain, land and water, cause local variations of temperature, and every such variation modifies or makes a current. In the air we all know how many shiftings of the wind will be peculiar to a mountain hamlet, where a lake, a valley, and a mountain, cause a constant oscillation, and a sudden burst of sunshine is enough to raise the wind. ΕΙ 5. Mechanical obstructions, such as mountain peaks, in the bed of the great ocean of air, modify its streams, of course; and the great currents in the world of water are, of course, split, deflected, and directed on their way, by all the continents and islands about and around which they flow. Great currents pour like mighty rivers through the plain of ocean, and fixed by the laws of nature though their banks be banks of water, they are almost as sharply defined as if they were of granite masonry. These are constant; there are others periodical, occasioned by periodical winds, tides, &c.; and there are also variable currents caused by melting ice, and other accidents, irregular in their occurrence. 6. You observe that the great world of water serves not only as a home for countless forms of life, but that to us land creatures it serves also as an appara'tus for the regulation of our climates. Cold currents come to limit the sun's monarchy, and warm streams flow to melt the icebergs where they travel out of bounds. That is not all, nor nearly all. One characteristic of the works of nature is continually to be recognized. Man makes a beautiful machine, worthy of admiration, in which many wheels and teeth combine, perhaps to make a piece of lace; it will make only lace, and nothing else. The works of nature are incom'parably more simple, and yet there is nothing so minute as to be created for one purpose only. In its way, a blade of grass, or lump of dirt, no less than the great sea, heaps use on use, and proof on proof of a Sublime Intelligence. DICKENS. XCV. THE WIND AND RAIN. 1. VAPOR rises from water, and from every moist body, under the influence of heat. The greater the heat, the more the vapor; but even in winter, from the surface of an ice-field, vapor rises. The greater the heat, the greater the expansion of the vapor. It is the nature of material things to expand under heat, and to contract under cold; so water does, except in the act of freezing, when, for a beneficent purpose, it is constituted an exception to the rule. Vapor rises freely from lakes, rivers, and moist land; but most abundantly, of course, it rises from the sea, and nowhere more abundantly than where the sun is hottest. So it rises in the zone of variable winds and calms, abundant, very much expanded, therefore imperceptible. 2. There comes a breath of colder air on the ascending current; its temperature falls. It had contained as much vapor as it would hold in its warm state; when cooled it will not hold so much; the excess, therefore, must part company, and be condensed again: clouds rapidly form, and as the condensation goes on in this region with immense rapidity, down comes the discarded vapor in the original state of water, out of which it had been raised. Sudden precipitation, and the violent rubbing against each other, of two air-currents unequally warmed, develop eleotricity; and then we have thunder and lightning. 3. Rain, being elicited by heat from water, will, of course, abound most where the sun is hottest. The average yearly fall of rain between the tropics is ninety-five inches, but in the tem perate zone only thirty-five. The greatest rain-fall, however, is precipitated in the shortest time; tropical clouds like to get it over and have done with it. Ninety-five inches fall in eighty days on the equator, while at St. Petersburg the yearly rain-fall is but seventeen inches, spread over one hundred and sixty-nine days. Again, a tropical wet day is not continuously wet. The morning is clear; clouds form about ten o'clock, the rain begins at twelve, and pours till about half-past four; by sunset the clouds are gone, and the night is invariably fine. That is a tropical day during the rainy season. 4. What does the " rainy season" mean?—At a point twentythree and a half degrees north of the equator, at the tropic of Cancer, the vertical sun appears to stop when it is midsummer with us. As it moves southward, our summer wanes; it crosses the equator, and appears to travel on until it has reached twentythree and a half degrees on the other side of the line, -the tropic of Capricorn; then six months have passed; it is midwinter with us, and midsummer with people in the southern hemisphere. The sun turns back (and the word tropic means the place of turning), retraces its course over the equator, and at the expiration of a twelvemonth is at our tropic again, bringing us summer. EI 5. Now, the rainy season is produced between the tropics by the powerful action of the sun, wherever it is nearly vertical, in sucking up vast quantities of vapor, which become condensed in the upper colder regions of the atmosphere, and dash to earth again as rain. The rainy season, therefore, follows the sun. When the sun is at or near the tropic of Cancer, both before and after turning, all places near that tropic have their rainy season; when the sun makes a larger angle with their zenith, it has taken the rainy season with it to another place. It is here obvious that a country between the tropics, and far from each, is passed over by the sun, in its apparent course, at two periods in the same year, with a decided interval between them. Such a country must have, therefore, and does have, two rainy and two dry seasons. ΕΙ 6. The trade-winds, blowing equably, do not deposit much of their vapor while still flowing over the Atlantic. These winds-so called from being favorable to commerce-blow constantly, one in a north-east and the other in a south-east direction, within about twenty-eight degrees on each side of the equator. ΕΙ 8. Winds are caused, like currents of the sea, by inequalities of temperature. The hurricane is a remarkable storm wind, peculiar to certain portions of the world. It rarely takes its rise beyond the tropics, and it is the only storm to dread within the region of the trade-winds. In the temperate zone, hurricanes do now and then occur, which, crossing the Atlantic from America, strike the coasts of Europe. It is the nature of a hurricane to travel round and round, as well as forward, very much as a corkscrew travels through a cork, only the circles are all flat, and described by a rotatory wind upon the surface of the water. Hurricanes always travel away from the equator. North of the equator, the great storm, revolving as it comes, rolls from the east towards the west; inclining from the equator, that is, northward. It always comes in that way; always describes in its main course the curve of an ellipse. EI 9. The typhoon, a relation of the hurricane's, is of Chinese extraction. It is met with only in the China seas, not so far south as the Island of Mindana'o, nor so far north as Core'a, except upon the eastern borders of Japan'. A typhoon walks abroad not oftener than about once every three or four years; |