PRECIPITATION OP MOISTURE. 153 



North, days, 40-7. South, days, 34-2. 



North-east,... „ 47-6. South-west,... „ 104-0. 



East, „ 22-6. West, „ 38-0. 



South-east,... „ 19-9. North-west,... „ 24.1. 



The east wind, cooling down the atmosphere, may occasion rain ; 

 but all our deluges come from the south and west. 



The air, wh^n it reaches the polar regions, being greatly cooled 

 down, deposits its moisture in the form of snow ; and of this are 

 formed the fields of ice which are characteristic of the Arctic and 

 Antartic regions alike. 



By Dr Scoresby, it is reported that in the Arctic regions it snows 

 nine days out of ten in the months of April, May and June. With 

 southerly winds near the borders of the ice, where moist air, blowing 

 from the sea, meets with the cold breeze from the ice, the heaviest 

 falls of snow occur. In this case a depth of two or three inches falls 

 in an hour. 



In crossing and recrossing the Atlantic, in certain latitudes, 

 frequently are fogs encountered : the cause and occasion is the same. 

 Fragments of Arctic glaciers broken off and floated away by oceanic 

 currents, as icebergs, cool down the ocean and the atmosphere nearer 

 to the tropics, and that to such an extent as to occasion a deposition 

 of moisture wherever they go, and it may be for a hundred miles 

 around them. 



As some indication of the immensity of the quantity of moisture 

 brought back to high latitudes by the return currents in the upper 

 regions of the atmosphere, I would remind my reader of the immense 

 body of water composing Lake Superior, Lake Michgan, Lake Erie, 

 and Lake Ontario, in America, pouring over the Falls of Niagara 

 unceasingly, and flowing through the Thousand Isles into the St. 

 Lawrence ; and of the waters poured into the ocean by all the rivers 

 of the world, great and small alike : these are but the drainage of 

 the water precipitated by the way on the valleys through which they 

 flow ; I would remind him of glaciers of the Alps, the product of the 

 comparatively trifling portion arrested by the higher part of that 

 mountain range as it was being borne onwards to the north ; and I 

 would remind him of the immensity of the deposits near to the 

 pole, not frozen sea, but frozen rain. 



In a volume lately published, entitled " Under the Northern 

 Lights," by Mr MacGraham, — a correspondent of the ** New York 



