CLIMATE. 435 



sow the earth with flowers. The summer wind was said to 

 be genial, kind, and maternal, nursing and perfecting a 

 growing and expanding world. The autumnal wind was 

 thought beneficent and good, when it showered down the 

 ripened fruits of the globe in plenty upon all creatures, as 

 from the hand of a loving parent. Pierce and stern the 

 winter winds rushed from their homes in the cloud-chasms, 

 hurrying the life-forms to silent sleep, and giving the earnest 

 of a temporary death to nature, again to be relieved by the 

 promises of resurrection and life by the returning airs of 

 spring. The fabulous cave of ^Eolus was not a mere crea- 

 tion of the poet, but a significant symbol in the minds of men 

 that there were laws for the winds, and that intelligent and 

 intelligible forces determined the phenomena of the air. 



This was all beautiful and well before the arrival on the 

 planet of the systematic meteorologist, and before the scis- 

 sors of philosophy had commenced " clipping the wings of 

 angels," and it had come to pass that the poet's talk about 

 the " waste airs pathless blue" was more poetical than true, 

 and the secrets of the "viewless winds" were fixed "among 

 the dull catalogue of common things." 



Ruthless science, with her army of explorers, has navi- 

 gated, as it were, and sounded, this air-ocean of fifty miles 

 depth ; has penetrated its mysterious phenomena ; has 

 wrestled with and exhausted its secrets. She now under- 

 stands and has fixed its currents and motions ; has arranged 

 its cataracts, and defined its eddies and roaring maelstroms; 

 its death-trails of the tornados ; its circling arena of the 

 trade-winds ; its fiery tracks of the monsoon, harmattan, and 

 sirocco ; its chimneys of aspiration, and vortices of gyratory 

 respiration ; its dances of electricity and magnetism, and its 

 boilings and surgings of caloric. 



The beautifully-systematized and harmoniously-arranged 

 machinery of the atmospheric sea has been made the sub- 

 ject of scientific analysis, and its laws announced and been 

 demonstrated to the understanding of man, as plainly as the 

 school-boy's rule of three. 



