124 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE SEA, AKD ITS METEOROLOGY. 



trade-wind region generally at sea, I estimate that it does not 

 exceed four feet. 



302. We see the light breaking in upon lis, for we now begin 

 I'hysicai adjustments, to perceive whj it is that the proportions between 

 the land and w^ater 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, neither animal 

 nor vegetable, would not have been as they are. And as they 

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

 regards the things of this world that he takes note of the sparrow's 

 fall, and numbers the very hairs of our head, doubtless designed 

 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 v/ell-being of all the inhabitants 

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

 tions that we are endeavoming to point out, affords new and striking 

 evidence 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 evapo- 

 ration : thus the amount of w^ater borne down by every river that 

 runs into the sea (§ 270) may be considered as the excess of the 

 precipitation over the evaporation that takes place in the valley 

 drained by that river. In other parts of the earth the evaporation 

 and precipitation are exactly equal, as in those inland basins 

 such as that in which the city of Mexico, Lake Titicaca, the 

 Oaspian Sea, etc., etc., are situated, which basins have no ocean 

 drainage. If more rain fell in the valley of the Caspian Sea than 

 is evaporated from it, that sea would finally get full and overflow 

 the whole of that great basin. If less fell than is evaporated from 

 it again, then that sea, in the course of time, would dry up, and 

 plants and animals there would all perish for the want of water. 

 In the sheets of water which w^e find distributed over that and 

 -every other inhabitable inland basin, we see reservoirs or evaporat- 

 ing surfaces just sufficient for the supply of that degree of moisture 

 which is best adapted to the well-being of the plants and animals 

 that people such basins. In other parts of the earth still, we find 

 places, as the Desert of Sahara, in which neither evaporation nor 



