LOCH C RERAN. 



when you are hungry, and nothing more delicate is at 

 hand. Even this is something, and may be considered 

 sufficient result to justify the by no means disagreeable 

 experiment on our vile body. We present the information 

 to those whom it may concern. 



It is curious how certain scientific ideas or observa- 

 tions become public property, and the rough general 

 conception comes to be accepted without question by the 

 multitude, while others rap in vain for admittance 

 into the category of their faiths. The population have 

 come to talk as glibly about the Gulf Stream as if they 

 had been occupied with the thermometric readings along 

 its lengthened course. Must we really look to some 

 marked alteration of its course for the comparatively 

 high temperature of our western sea this winter, and the 

 consequent increase of activity in the reproductive 

 organs of marine creatures ? It would not be unreason- 

 able to suppose that, apart from the cosmical influences 

 whose action directs the prevailing currents of the ocean, 

 the local result of an exceptionally severe winter in 

 certain Arctic regions might partially divert the warm 

 stream from the Gulf, through earlier contact with the 

 cold Arctic current. The importance of this stream to 

 Arctic explorers north of Europe has been repeatedly 

 acknowledged, and the wide difference in its effects from 

 year to year upon the ice of the Arctic seas is probably 

 due both to changes in its movements and its temperature. 

 For no doubt if the prevailing winds, when it is travers- 

 ing the temperate seas, are from the northwest, it will 

 arrive upon our coasts not only somewhat farther south, 

 but vastly colder than if it had been subjected through- 

 out its course to the warm hurricanes from their cradle 

 in the Gulf of Mexico. We should thus anticipate that 



