292 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE PAKADOX OF THE EAST WIND 



By Pbofessob ALEXANDER McADIE 



BLUB HILL METEOROLOGICAL OBSEBVATORY 



ABOUT ten miles south of Boston, on the highest land within sight 

 of the sea from Maine to Florida, is a well-known meteorological 

 observatory, founded some thirty years ago by a young graduate of the 

 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The founder, Lawrence Botch, 

 became in time the pioneer explorer of the upper air, contributing much 

 to our knowledge of air motion at different levels. In collaboration with 

 Teisserenc de Bort, he may be credited with inaugurating the campaign 

 which resulted in the important discovery of the double character of our 

 atmosphere, as shown by the two great divisions of the stratosphere and 

 the troposphere. 



A few years before his death, Botch, who was then professor of 

 meteorology at Harvard, remodeled the Blue Hill Observatory and on the 

 walls of the new library placed eight symbolized figures of the winds. 

 These were copies in relief of the winged human figures on the frieze 

 of the not-too-well-known Tower of the Winds, which has stood for 

 twenty-odd centuries at the base of the hill crowned by the Acropolis. 



The Greek was a past-master in the art of personifying natural phe- 

 nomena and these figures of the winds are ornamented, clothed and 

 posed so as to suggest the characteristic feature of the particular direc- 

 tion represented. Boreas, an old friend, representing the north wind, is 

 a determined-looking fellow, warmly clad but active in spite of his many 

 wraps and heavy buskins. He carries a conch shell and has been blowing 

 it. The sculptor meant, of course, to represent the boisterous roaring of 

 the north wind, especially noticeable where the air in its passage comes 

 over some range or group of hills. Of all the winds, Boreas is the noisi- 

 est. But it is not so much with Boreas, or his companion on the left and 

 fellow noise-maker, the ruffian Skiron, warder of the northwest winds, that 

 we are concerned, as with the east wind, the hopeful, open-faced Aphe- 

 liotes. Apheliotes Nov. Ang. is perhaps an unfamiliar phrase yet it is 

 only the classical rendering of a very familiar expression, namely, the 

 east wind of New England. And many speak of the east wind as if it 

 belonged to New England alone, associating this stream of surface air, a 

 very shallow current, as we shall show later, with the coast north of Cape 

 Cod, although it prevails along the entire Atlantic seaboard. 



