ON THE GEOLOGICAL AGENCY OF THE WINDS. 237 



siaii'Gnlf to be conveyed, and this is the dkection in which we find 

 indications that it is conveyed. For to leeward do we find, in each 

 case, a river, telling to us, by signs not to be mistaken, that it re- 

 ceives more water from the clouds than it gives back to the winds. 



661. Is it not a curious circumstance, that the winds which trav- 

 el the road suggested from the southern hemisphere should, when 

 they touch the earth on the polar side of the tropic of Cancer, be 

 so thirsty, more thirsty, much more, than those which travel on 

 either side of their path, and which are supposed to have come 

 fi:om southern seas, not from southern lands ? 



662. The Mediterranean has to give those winds three times as 

 much vapor as it receives from them (§ 648) ; the Bed Sea gives 

 them as much as they can take, and receives nothing back in re- 

 turn but a little dew (§ 407) ; the Persian Gulf also gives more 

 than it receives. What becomes of the rest ? Doubtless it is 

 given to the winds, that they may bear it ofi'to distant regions, and 

 make lands fruitful, that but for these sources of supply would be 

 almost rainless, if not entirely arid, waste, and barren. 



663. These seas and arms of the ocean now present themselves 

 to the mind as counterpoises in the great hygrometrical machinery 

 of our planet. — As sheets of water placed where they are to bal- 

 ance the land in the trade-wind region of South America and 

 South Africa, they now present themselves. When the founda- 

 tions of the earth were laid, we know who it was that " measured 

 the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out the heavens 

 with a span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a meas- 

 ure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a bal- 

 ance ;" and hence we know also that they are arranged both ac- 

 cording to proportion and to place. 



664. Here, then, we see harmony in the winds, design in the 

 mountains, order in the sea, arrangement in the dust, and form for 

 the desert. Here are signs of beauty and works of grandem' ; and 

 we may now fancy that, in this exquisite system of adaptations 

 and compensations, we can almost behold, in the E-ed and Medi- 

 terranean Seas, the very waters that were held in the hollow of 

 the Almighty hand when he weighed the Andes and balanced the 

 hills of Africa in the comprehensive scales. 



