16 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



small portion of the great South American continent, 

 there is no land in their way, no inhabited country for 

 them to exercise their splendid recuperative and 

 cleansing forces upon. And the question might per- 

 haps be justified if the globe were divisible into self- 

 contained sections, and was not one entity. The work 

 of the world-encircling winds of the Southern Seas has 

 its due effect upon all the rest of the globe, which, 

 after all, is but a small sphere in the cosmic scheme, 

 and to imagine it sweeping eternally around the globe, 

 chasing its own tail, as it were, and accomplishing 

 nothing, is to take a petty and parochial view of such 

 mighty activities. Kest assured that, although we 

 may not be able to assess it in terms of arithmetic, the 

 work of the brave west winds of the Southern Ocean 

 are of the highest importance to the health and well- 

 being of the globe as a whole, and when meteorology, 

 or the science of weather, has come to its own, we shall 

 know how and why. For the present we must take on 

 trust the fact that this immense wind system, the 

 greatest on our globe, is ever working for the benefit 

 of all mankind. 



But let us now take a long step backward to the 

 north-western shores of the Atlantic, and see what 

 effect the oceanic winds have upon the mighty con- 

 tinent of America. Truly there is here a vast problem 

 awaiting us, for, as we have already seen, the winds of 

 the North Atlantic, northward of the tropics, are from 

 and not to the American continent. So that, speaking 

 generally, it is fairly safe to say that they do not 

 exercise much influence upon its health, except in one 

 important particular, which is that by blowing from the 

 continent they create an indraught from the westward ; 



