A VENERABLE CLIMATIC FALLACY i8i 



surface, but is divided into tracts so well separated from one another 

 and so nearly surrounded by the sea that they show the sea's normal 

 influence. There is only just about enough land to bring out the 

 normal effects of the sea influence satisfactorily under present 

 conditions. 



The Northern Hemisphere, on the contrary, has more nearly 

 equal areas of land and of sea, but there is a distribution of these 

 that helps us in distinguishing their individual influences. Viewed 

 from the North Pole, the center of cold of this hemisphere, the land 

 is seen to surround it in the form of a great triangle of which Africa 

 and Asia form the base and North America the apex. Most of what 

 sea there is in the Northern Hemisphere lies outside this triangle 

 and in two parts, the North Atlantic and the North Pacific. The 

 North Pacific is broadly connected with the South Pacific and may 

 be regarded as an outl3dng adjunct of the water hemisphere on the 

 south.^ The connection of the North Atlantic with the South 

 Atlantic is much narrower and their relations much less intimate, 

 for the protruding eastern angle of South America splits the equa- 

 torial current and measurably differentiates the two oceans. The 

 North Atlantic is very much more nearly surrounded by land than 

 the North Pacific and its mean temperature is also higher than that 

 of the other oceans. 



Into the triangle of land about the North Pole there penetrate 

 several offshoots or dependencies of the main oceanic bodies. 

 These are land-girt in varying ways and degrees and these relation- 

 ships help to show the climatic effects of certain special relations 

 of land and sea, as will appear later. The dependencies of the North 

 Atlantic connect it with the North Polar Sea — scarcely worthy of 

 being called an ocean — ^which immediately surrounds the North 

 Pole. 



Comparison of the hemispheres as a whole. — ^As is well known, 

 the Southern or Oceanic Hemisphere has a distinctly cooler and more 

 inhospitable climate than the Northern Hemisphere, in which land 

 is a much larger factor. This may be verified to any desired degree 



^ The North Pacific is always included in the technical "Water Hemisphere." 

 This stands obhque to the climatic zones and on that account cannot well be used in 

 a brief comparison of climatic hemispheres. 



