150 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



the rain and soft ocean winds beat on the soil of England 

 with a new draught of healing and fertility ; and when the 

 summer has been damp and lowering, we feel hardly less 

 glad to reach the time of year when wind and rain are 

 seasonable, and to end the continual disappointment of 

 expecting fine weather in vain. 



The autumn sense of being merged in the rains of the 

 sea is not a mere fancy, but is strictly true to the meteoro- 

 logy of a normal year. England lies on the frontiers of 

 two great systems of weather which are perpetually advanc- 

 ing and receding across our borders for the greater part of 

 each year. It is this peculiar situation which makes our 

 climate proverbially so uncertain. A great anticyclone, or 

 system of fine weather, is normally centred to the south- 

 west of us in the neighbourhood of the Azores ; and a 

 cyclonic or stormy system has its seat to northwards over 

 Iceland and Greenland. In a normal summer the Atlantic 

 anticyclone over the Azores spreads northwards and em- 

 braces the greater part of our islands. This staves off the 

 series of cyclonic systems which normally coast along the 

 borders of an anticyclone, sending them spinning north- 

 eastwards over our far north-western coasts, or outside our 

 area altogether. In autumn the Atlantic anticyclone con- 

 tracts ; the limits of settled fine weather recede to Portugal 

 or Madeira, and the Iceland and Greenland depression 

 expands over Britain. The storms passing from the western 

 Atlantic along the northern fringe of the great anticyclone 

 now find our islands in their path ; and we are drenched 

 with their abundant rain. The term anticyclone simply 

 means the opposite of a cyclone ; and a cyclone in meteoro- 

 logy means any storm-system with a revolving or eddy- 

 ing motion, and not only the very violent revolving 

 storms of the tropics to which the name is more familiarly 



