.58 THE OCEAN WORLD. 



Lieutenant De Haven, navigating in search of Sir John Franklin, was 

 caught in the ice in the middle of the channel in Wellington Strait. 

 During the nine months which he remained in captivity, he drifted 

 nearly thirteen hundred miles towards the south ; and the ship Resolute, 

 abandoned by Captain Kellet in an ice-field of immense extent, was 

 drifted towards the south with this vast mass to a much greater 

 distance. 



Some curious speculations are hazarded by Dr. Maury, arising out of 

 his investigations of winds and currents, facts being revealed which 

 indicate the existence of a climate, mild by comparison, within the 

 Antarctic Circle. These indications are a low barometer, a high degree 

 of aerial rarefaction, and strong winds from the north. " The winds," 

 he says, u were the first to whisper of this strange state of things, and 

 to intimate to us that the Antarctic climates are in winter very unlike 

 the Arctic for rigour and severity." The result of an immense mass 

 of observation on the polar and equatorial winds reveals a marked 

 difference in atmospherical movements north, as compared with the 

 same movements south of the Equator ; the equatorial winds of the 

 northern hemisphere being only in excess between the tenth and 

 thirteenth parallel, while those of the southern hemisphere are 

 dominant over a zone of forty-five degrees, or from thirty-five degrees 

 south to ten degrees north. 



" The fact that the influence of the polar indraught upon the winds 

 should extend from the Antarctic to the parallel of forty degrees south, 

 while that from the Arctic is so feeble as scarcely to be felt in fifty degrees 

 north, is indicative enough as to the difference in degree of aerial rare- 

 faction over the two regions. The significance of the fact is enhanced by 

 the consideration that the ( brave west winds,' which are bound to the 

 place of greatest rarefaction, rush more violently and constantly along 

 to their destination than do the counter-trades of the northern hemi- 

 sphere. Why should these polar-bound winds differ so much in 

 strength and prevalence, unless there be a much more abundant 

 supply of caloric, and, consequently, a higher degree of rarefaction, at 

 one pole than at the other r" 



That this is the case is confirmed by all known barometrical obser- 

 vations, which are very much lower in the Antarctic than in the Arctic, 

 and Dr. Maury thinks this is doubtless due to the excess in Antarctic 

 regions of aqueous vapour and this latent heat. 



