106U TrANSACTIOXS Olr THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 



scliatka current, which, he concludes, is a prolongation of that upon 

 the coast of Japan. 



TVe shall draw attention at this meeting to only that part of 

 Judge Daly's able examination of this question, which relates to the 

 course and velocity of the gulf stream. He says we liave no positive 

 information as to the course of the gulf stream beyond the coast of Xor- 

 way. In the best and most recent atlases., siich as Johnston's Physical 

 Atlas, last edition ; the Koyal Atlas of 1860, by the same author; 

 the Atlas of the Geographical Society of Weimar, 1868 ; and Kie- 

 pert's (Stiler's) Atlas, which has just been completed in Gotha, there 

 is no agreement respecting it. In the first named of these works, 

 Johnston's Physical Atlas, its course is represented differently upon 

 different maps. The fact that driftwood was found, together with 

 vegetable productions of the West Indies, upon the northwest shore 

 of Spitzbergen, as high as eighty degrees northern latitude, by the 

 Swedish expeditions of 1861 and 1868, indicates that it reaches that 

 far, but as the officers of the last expedition in their report say, " in 

 a greatly weakened state," and the circumstance that bottles thrown 

 overboard in the West Indies have been found upon tlie coast of 

 Norway, togetlier with the fact that there is a slow current along 

 that coast as far as the flord or bay of Yaranger, which keeps the 

 navigation open for that distance throughout the year, would indicate 

 also that an easterly branch of it runs along that coast ; but, if it 

 were continued from there to Cape Kanin, and from thence to ISTova 

 Zembla, and northerly, as it is represented in Kiepert's Atlas of 

 1860, we would naturally expect to see its effects in ameliorating the 

 climate of that inliospitable shore, and that !N"ova Zembla would not 

 be, as it is, so bleak and desolate as to be incapable of maintaining 

 even a permanent savage population. 



As the movement of the gulf stream is due to the diurnal motion 

 o,f the globe, it necessarily diminishes gradually, both in volume and 

 velocity, as it runs noi'thward. The contrast is very great between 

 the same current of the coast of Florida and when it approaches 

 IS'ewfoundland. In passing to the high latitudes of the Arctic seas it 

 is BO reduced and weakened that Admiral Irminger, of the Danish 

 navy, in 1853, between sixty-one and sixty-three degrees north lati- 

 tude, and fourteen degrees eighteen minutes west longitude, found 

 that it ran, during an observation of twenty days, only at the rate of 

 3.1 nautical miles per day, while, at the end of the Gulf of Florida, 

 in the parallel of Cape Canaveral, according to observations made by 



