Temperature of the Globe. 8jJ3 



whole science of climate would in a few years appear in a new 

 and much improved form. 



The zeal by which the United States of North America are 

 animated, has arisen equally strong in the lately emancipated 

 Spanish America. Journals, printed 9,000 feet above the level 

 of the sea,^ give daily the height of the thermometer, barometer, 

 and hygrometer, taken with very exact instruments, made at 

 Paris and London, in the enormous extent from the 28° N. to 

 tlve 40° S. lat. Thus the political revolution of these countries 

 has not only improved their own condition and the industry of 

 Europe, but it will also, when the population increases, and 

 scientific knowledge spreads, over so many mountains and ele- 

 vated plains, lead to a better knowledge of the higher regions of 

 the atmosphere. In those countries, whole provinces rise like 

 islands in an ocean of air, to the height of Etna, or the Peak 

 of Teneriffe : in the old continent, where the travelling natu- 

 ralist erects his tent near the line of permanent snow, populous 

 towns are found in America. 



In modern times Africa, which the ancients represented upon 

 coins and monuments as the kingdom of palms, has been found 

 rather deficient in this tribe of trees ; and, in the same manner, 

 later travellers have modified in a singular manner the be- 

 lief in the constant uniform tropical heat of the African de- 

 serts. In the Oasis of Murzuk in Fezzan, Ritchie and Lyon 

 found, during several summer months, the thermometer in the 

 shade, at from 5 to 6 feet above the ground, to indicate 86° to 91° 

 Fahr. ( 24° to 26° R.), at 5 o'clock in the morning, and from 

 1 18° to 129° Fahr. (38° to 43° R.) at noon, a temperature which 

 probably arose from the radiation produced by the sand floating 

 in the air ; and, in the same place, Dr Oudney died of cold in 

 the end of December. This spot is situated in the centre of Af- 

 rica, on the frontiers of Bornou, under the 13th degree of lat, and, 

 according to barometrical measurement is not 1200 feet above the 

 level of the sea. It is said that the water in the leather bottles, 

 which Oudney's caravan carried along with them, was frozen this 

 same night. But Major Denham, Clapperton's companion, 

 whom I desired, after his return from the lake Tchad, to give me 

 some oral explanation, told me, that, in the morning, some hours 



