134 Facts in Meteorology. 
Rocky mountains, or from high latitudes on a course parallel to 
those mountains, this region becomes subject to all the rigors of a 
Siberian winter. 
The climate of China bears a close resemblance to that of the 
United States, and the continental and oceanic positions of the two 
countries are equally analogous. Both countries are subject to the 
extremes of heat and cold above most others in the same latitudes. 
. The character of the polar current, and the great quantities of ice 
which. it brings to the north-east coast of America, is supposed to in- 
fluence the climate of that coast, particularly in the spring months. 
At Newfoundland, which is in the latitude of Paris, late in the month 
of June, 1831, the bays and harbors were full of ice. 
Of Deserts. 
The atmosphere is capable of absorbing moisture in proportion to 
its temperature, and a current of air passing from a colder toa warmer 
region has therefore a constantly increasing capacity for moisture. 
This peculiarity necessarily pertains to one portion of each of the 
great natural circuits of wind, or atmospheric current, in both hemis- 
pheres. The necessary consequence is a great scarcity of rain in 
the regions falling under this portion of the current, and hence those 
arid deserts which occupy so large a portion of the otherwise most 
fruitful latitudes. 
On examining the map of the world, it may be seen that this scar- 
city of rain prevails chiefly, in countries lying upon the eastern borders 
of the great oceans, and of their atmospheric circuits, and between 
the 18th and 32d parallels of latitude. On the western borders of 
the Atlantic, in both the Americas, where the aerial currentis passing 
from the lower to higher latitudes, there are abundant supplies of rain. 
The same is true also of China and the eastern coast of Africa, and 
also of the western shores of the Pacific generally, except as the ef- 
fect is modified by the misplaced counter current of the Monsoons. 
But not so on the eastern shores of these oceans, where the atmos- 
phere which forms the extra-tropical winds, falling in again towards _ 
the equator, presents a constant demand for additional moisture, and 
parches and desolates extensive regions of coun 
In the atmospheric basin of the North Atlantic, we have the most 
striking exhibition of this effect in the great African desert of Saha- 
ra. Continuing our survey on the same parallels, we have also the 
great deserts of Lybia, Egypt, and Arabia, subject, for the greater part, 
