§ 302. RAINS AND RIVERS. 12 ;> 



ration from the warm waters of this ocean. If it were all rained 

 down upon India, it would give it a drainage which would require 

 rivers having sixteen times the capacity of the Mississippi to dis- 

 charge. Nevertheless, the evaporation from the North Indian 

 Ocean required for such a flood is only one sixteenth of an inch 

 daily throughout the year.^ Availing myself of the best light? 

 — dim at best — as to the total amount of evaporation that annu- 

 ally takes place in the trade-wind region generally at sea, I esti- 

 mate that it does not exceed four feet. 



302. We see the light beginning to break upon us, for we now 

 Physical adjustments, bcgln to pcrccivc why it is that the proportions be- 

 tween the land and water were made as we find them in nature. 

 If there had been more water and less land, we should have had 

 more rain, and vice versa ; and then climates would have been 

 different from what they are now, and the inhabitants, animal or 

 vegetable, would not have been as they are. And as they are, 

 that wise Being who, in his kind providence, so watches over and 

 regards the things of this world that he takes notice of the spar- 

 row's fall, and numbers the very hairs of our head, doubtless de- 

 signed them to be. The mind is delighted, and the imagination 

 charmed, by contemplating the physical arrangements of the earth 

 from such points of view as this is which we now have before us ; 

 from it the sea, and the air, and the land, appear each as a part of 

 that grand machinery upon which the well-being of all the inhab- 

 itants of earth, sea, and air depends; and which, in the beautiful 

 adaptations that we are pointing out, affords new and striking ev- 

 idence that they all have their origin in one omniscient idea, just 

 as the different parts of a watch may be considered to have been 

 constructed and arranged according to one human design. In 

 some parts of the earth the precipitation is greater than the evap- 

 oration ; thus the amount of water borne down by every river that 



* In his annual report to the Society {Transactions of the Bombay Geographical 

 Society fi-om May, 1849, to August, 1850, vol. ix.), Dr. Buist, the secretary, states, on 

 the authority of Mr. Laidly, the evaporation at Calcutta to be " about fifteen feet an-" 

 nually ; that between the Cape and Calcutta it averages, in October and November, 

 nearly three fourths of an inch daily; between 10° and 20° in the Bay of Bengal, it 

 was found to exceed an inch daily. Supposing this to be double the average through- 

 out the year, we should," continues the doctor, "have eighteen feet of evaporation 

 annually," All the heat received by the intertropical seas from the sun annually 

 would not be sufficient to convert into vapor a layer of water from them sixteen feet 

 deep. It is these observations as to the rate of evaporation on shore that have led 

 (§ 280) to such extravagant estimates as to the rate at sea. 



