282 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE SEA, AND ITS METEOROLOGY. 



makes these winds to blow, include all the great deserts of Asia, 

 and the districts of least precipitation in Europe. A line from the 

 Galapagos Islands through Florence in Italy, another from the 

 mouth of the Amazon through Aleppo in Holy Land (Plate YII.), 

 would, after passing the tropic of Cancer, mark upon the sm-face 

 of the earth the route of these winds ; this is that " lee country " 

 (§ 298) which, if such be the system of atmospherical circulation, 

 ought to be scantily supphed with rains. Now the hyetographic 

 map of Em-ope, in Johnston's beautiful Fhysical Atlas, places the 

 region of least precipitation between these two lines (Plate YIL). 



542. It would seem that Nature, as if to reclaim this " lee " land 

 Relays for supplying fpom the dcscrt, had stationed by the wayside of 



them with vapour by , , . -. . /••it j r\ 



the way. thcso '^^ncis a succcssion 01 mland seas to serve them 



as relays for supplying them with moisture. There is the Mediter- 

 ranean, with its arms, the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Aral, all of 

 which are situated exactly in this direction, as though these sheets 

 of water were designed, in the grand system of aqueous arrange- 

 ments, to supply with fresh vapour winds that had already left rain 

 enough behind them to make an Amazon and an Orinoco of. Now 

 that there has been such an elevation of land out of the water, we 

 infer from the fact that the Andes were once covered by the sea, 

 for their tops are now crowned with the remams of marine animals. 

 ^Vhen they and their continent were submerged — admitting that 

 Em'ope in general outline was then as it now is — it cannot be 

 supposed, if the chculation of vapour were then such as it is supposed 

 now to be, that the climates of that part of the Old World which is 

 under the lee of those mountains were then as scantily supplied 

 with moisture as they now are. When the sea covered South 

 America, nearly all the vapour which is now precipitated upon the 

 Amazonian water-shed was conveyed thence by the winds, and dis- 

 tributed, it may be supposed, among the countries situated along 

 the route (Plate YII.) ascribed to them. 



543. If ever the Caspian Sea exposed a larger surface for evapo- 

 Adjustments in this ratiou than it now does — and no doubt it did; if 

 piaos. the precipitation in that valley ever exceeded the 

 evaporation from it, as it does in all valleys drained into the open 

 sea, then there must have been a change of hygrometrical condi- 

 tions there. And admittmg the vapour-sprmgs for that valley to 

 be situated in the direction supposed, the rising up of a continent 

 from the bottom of the sea, or the upheaval of a range of moun- 

 tains in certain parts of America, Africa, or Spain, across the route 



