712 ABOUT THE ATMOSPHERE AI^D ITS PHENOMENA. 



(1) That at the equator or within the tropics, where the rays of the San 

 are vertical, and constant in intensity, the surface air becomes heated, and 

 expanding, rises, creating a vacuum, and as this is an abhorrent thing to 

 nature, the air from the cooler surfaces rushes in to fill it — or as the latest 

 cyclopedia has it: "to fill the spaces left by the airs that have become 

 heated and passed up to the more elevated portions of the atmosphere in the 

 belt of the equatorial calms." 



(2) That this heated air, rising to a supposed height in an immense 

 column of several hundred miles diameter, divides in tiie upper regions and 

 flows off to the respective poles, supplying in its turn the place of the 

 cooler air drawn inward to the centre — making a circulation by two com- 

 plete circular currents coincident with the hemispheres of the globe. Here, 

 then are two vacuums, iu permanent existence, or rather a continuous va- 

 cuum of which the wind is in constant pursuit. If this is the law of atmos- 

 pheric movement, it must be consistent in all its parts — the lesser motion 

 as well as the grand movement of the whole. 



Now, what do we know? Take, almost any day in the year, a weather 

 chart of the signal office, on which is marked the direction of the wind at a 

 given hour all over the American continent, and what do we find? — the 

 wind as varying in its direction as the points of the compass. At Kansas 

 City a north wind, at Omaha a south wind, at Denver an ea^t wind, and at 

 St. Louis a west wind. At Fort Scott, southwest, at Laramie northwest, 

 at Chicago northeast, and j^ew Orleans southeast. As changeable as the 

 wind, is a proverb as old as human observation. 



Then again, as we all know, here and all over Southern Kansas, we may 

 be to-day basking in the mildest weather that a southern breeze can bring 

 us, or we may bo sweltering with the torrid heat of summer, while at the very 

 same hour a fierce and chilling norther may be sweeping down the plains 

 of Texas. Or, we may ourselves be chilled with the raw breath of an east 

 wind, while above our heads in plain view from the west, is a warm river 

 of air flowing onward, bearing in its current the warm rain, and flashing 

 with the lightnings evolved from its latent heat. These things we see and 

 know, they are not consistent with such a law as we have been consider- 

 ing. Those facts have led to the question — is this theory, old as it is, sup- 

 ported by so much authority as it is, true? Is this theorj^ based upon the 

 general law as to expansion by iieat, and illustrated by the trade winds, the 

 fact? it is proposed now to test it by the record of the thermometer, kept 

 for a long series of years, both in the latitudes where this heating process 

 is supposed to be going on, and where the vacuuTxi is created, as also in the 

 latitudes where the cooler portions are assumed to be, from which the 

 refrigerated winds flow to the thermal vacuum, and over which the}" blow. 

 And we shall not only show that this assumption is not warranted by the 

 facts, but that these trade winds actually do blow from surfaces more highly 

 heated than those into which they blow — and that their movement is from 

 a higher into a lower temperature. The tables used are mainly those of 



