444 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE SEA, AND ITS IMETEOROLOGY. 



tins calm place — be sucli as to produce rapid condensation and 

 heavy precipitation (Chap. XX.), then we shall have, in the latent 

 heat hberated from all this vapom^, an agent sufficient not only to 

 produce a low barometer and a powerful indi'aught, but quite ade- 

 quate also to the mitigation of chmate there. 



865. Mere altitude, with its consequent refrigeration, does not 

 influences favourable scom as favourable as mouutain peaks and sohd sur- 

 to heavy precipitation. £^ggg ^q ^j^g condcusation and prccipitation of vapouT 

 in the air. In the trade-mnd regions out at sea it seldom rains ; 

 but let an island rise never so little above the water, and the preci- 

 pitation upon it becomes copious. In Colonel Sykes' (§ 299) 

 rain-faU at Cherraponjie, we have an annual precipitation* at 

 the rate of 577.6 inches during the six months of S.W. monsoons 

 — from May to October. Sm'ely no one wiU maintain that this 

 vapour, after rising from the sea, reached the height of 4500 feet 

 for the first time when it was blown upon the peaks of Cherraponjie. 

 Islands in the South Sea are everlastingly cloud-capped. If it 

 be mere refrigeration that condenses this vapour, why, one might 

 ask, should not the clouds form at the same height above the sea 

 whether there be an island below or not, and why should not these 

 clouds precipitate as copiously upon the water as they do upon the 

 land ? We only know that they do not. 



866. Captains King and Fitzroy exposed their rain gauge on 

 The climates of cor- tho westom slopcs of the Patagouian Andes, and 

 ISiiSSortrand^'^it coUected 153.75 mches in forty-one days; that 

 «o^th. is^ at the rate, as aheady (§ 827) stated, of 1368.7 

 inches in the year. The latent heat that is liberated during these 

 Tains gives to Eastern Patagonia its mdd chmate. It is this latent 

 heat which causes the hregularity in the barometric curve (§ 858) 

 between the parallels of 50°-55^ S. Here the westerly winds prevail ; 

 they carry over to the eastern coasts the air that, in passing the moun- 

 tains, is waiTQed by this liberated heat ; and thus, as I have already 

 (§ 729) endeavoured to show, we have an exception to the rule 

 under which meteorologists ascribe cold and severe chmates to the 

 windward or western, soft and mild to the leeward or eastern, shores 

 of extra-tropical oceans. Labrador and the Falkland Islands t are 

 in corresponding latitudes north and south. They are both on 

 the windward shore of the Atlantic ; they occupy relatively the 



* Keport of tlie twenty-secoufl meetings of the British Association for the 

 Advancement of Science, held at Belfast in September, 1852. 

 t Maury's Sailing Directions, sixth edition, p. 553. 



