§ 870, 871. THE ANTARCTIC REGIONS, ETC. 465 



Our whole ship, sails, spars, and all, seemed to partake of the 

 same ruddy hues. They were as if lighted up by some terrible, 

 conflagration. Taking all together, the howling, shrieking storm, 

 the noble ship plunging fearlessly beneath the crimson-crested 

 waves, the furious squalls of hail, snow, and sleet driving over 

 the vessel and falling to leeward in ruddy showers, the myste- 

 rious balls of electric fire resting on our mast-heads, yard-arms, 

 etc., and, above all, the awfid sublimity of the heavens, through 

 which coruscations of auroral light would often shoot in spiral 

 streaks and with meteoric brilliancy, altogether presented a scene 

 of terrible grandeur and awful sublimity surpassing the wildest 

 dreams of fancy. Words fail to convey any just idea of the mag- 

 nificence it presented. One must see it and feel it in order to re- 

 alize it. I have written this because I believe it an unusual oc- 

 currence to see the ' southern lights' at all, and also because this 

 was far superior, and, in fact, altogether different from our north- 

 ern lights, as seen from the latitude of Boston." 



870. Some objections to these views respecting the compara- 

 An erroneous opin- ^ivc mllducss of autarctic climatcs are suggested 



ion 



by common opinion. It is an opinion which is 

 generally received among physicists that the southern is colder 

 than the northern hemisphere, and that the austral are more se- 

 vere than the boreal climates, and that the antarctic icebergs, 

 both as to size and numbers, are witnesses of the fact. These 

 objections have weight; they deserve consideration. 



871. The answer is as follows: Between lat. 40° or lat. 45° 

 Tropical regions of ^^^ ^hc cquator, and parallel for parallel, the south- 

 Sphei-r^cooiCT^'Ti- ^^^ hemisphere is cooler than the northern. Eea- 

 than™£e''ofThe ^ou teachcs, and observations show that it is so. 

 northern. ^^^ bcyoud 45° S. obscrvations are wanting, and 



we are left to reason and conjecture. That the southern hemi- 

 sphere should, till within a certain distance of the pole, be warm- 

 er in winter and cooler in summer, and have a mean annual tem- 

 perature less than that of our hemisphere, may be explained by the 

 fact that the southern hemisphere has more water ; that the vapor 

 which is taken up from trans-equatorial seas and condensed into 

 rains for cis-equatorial rivers conveys with it a vast amount of heat 

 which the southern hemisphere receives from the sun. It is ren- 

 dered latent by evaporation on one side of the equator, and made 



G Cr 



