1030 OYSTERS, AND ALL ABOUT THEM. 



bergen its course appears to be changed by some blocking 

 or modifying agency. Here it was found to carry the 

 Austrian exploring ship Tegethoff towards the north-west, 

 and Mr. R. H. Scott, the secretary of the Meteorological 

 Council, in a work just issued, records the discovery, in 

 1881, on the coast of Labrador, of glass fishing-net floats, 

 of- a pattern used only by Norwegian fishermen, and which, 

 it would seem, must have been washed away from the coast 

 of Norway, and have made the circuit round the north of 

 Spitzbergen and along the Greenland coast to the spot where 

 they were found. It thus appears that a portion of the warm 

 Gulf Stream becomes lost in the ice-cold Labrador current 

 which skirts the American shore, and passes southward 

 beneath the heated river that flows into the open Atlantic 

 from the Gulf of Mexico. 



Of the Gulf Stream a feeble wave passes up the English 

 Channel and through the Straits of Dover ; its volume, 

 force, and warmth, however, being insufficient materially to 

 affect the general temperature of the North Sea, or to affect 

 it at all except within a limited area at the extreme south. 

 By the deep-sea explorations carried out by the Lightning 

 and Porcupine in 1868, 1869, and 1870, under the scientific 

 direction of Dr. Carpenter, Mr. J. Gwyn Jeffreys, and the 

 late Sir Wyville Thomson, it was established that along the 

 western side of Ireland and the Hebrides the heated water, 

 some little distance out, has a thickness of some eight 

 hundred fathoms. A portion of this warm water washes 

 the shores of Orkney and Shetland, and curves round into 

 the North Sea by the Pentland Firth and the channels 

 between these islands. Thus it comes about that the sur- 

 face water of the northern section of the North Sea is during 

 winter and early spring higher in temperature than that of 

 the middle and southern sections. 



