THE WINDS OF THE OCEAN 53 



shows conclusively that they have succeeded in bidding 

 defiance to the winds, and also that they must very 

 often find what a seaman calls " slants," or alterations 

 in the prevailing wind. More, it is often the case that 

 a gale extending over an enormous area, and travelling 

 at the rate of, say, one hundred miles a day, will be 

 entered by a sailing ship going in its direction, and as 

 she is travelling with it she will feel its full force for 

 several days, with but slight alteration in its direction. 

 But a full-powered steamship going against that gale 

 would soon pass across its area and emerge into the 

 better if unsettled weather in the rear of that gale. I 

 feel that this statement needs explanation, and yet I do 

 not want here to go into the intricacies of meteorology. 

 May I, then, briefly say that all gales outside the 

 tropics blow in a circular direction, as hinted at in 

 the mention of huricanes a few pages back. This, 

 however, "verges on the scientific," which is out of 

 the question in such a book as this. Yet unless the 

 law of storms is, however perfunctorily taken into 

 account, it does not seem possible to understand 

 anything about the great movements of extra-tropical 

 winds. 



Hitherto I have endeavoured to confine myself to 

 the movements of the winds over the ocean without 

 taking into account the influence that the land has 

 upon them when they come near it. That, however, 

 is very great, but fortunately can be understood fairly 

 well by the average landsman, who knows from every- 

 day experience how different the movement of wind 

 is in a hilly country to its regularity of force and 

 direction in a level one. Or, to make the comparison 

 still more homely, how many variations of wind we 



