630 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



Rocky Mountains, but without moisture enough in them to clothe with vegeta- 

 tion the rock-ribbed walls whose sombre and rugged nakedness attest the infre- 

 quency of rains upon them. Still the altitude of these mountains is so great, and 

 therefore so cold, that their supreme peaks wring from the shrinking winds what 

 little moisture remains in them, to add sparkling coronets of snow also to their 

 majestic heads. But these winds, pitching thence down the eastern slopes of the 

 Rocky Mountains, reach the plains of Colorado and New Mexico so completely 

 dry as to be unable to give forth even a morning dew, and hence the alkaline 

 sterility of these plains, which no human intervention can change or alleviate. ^ 



Now I hope it has been made apparent that these plains, as well as the pla- 

 teau of Utah, Nevada and Arizona, owe their sterility to no accidental nor reme- 

 dial cause, but to the immutable laws of Nature, which are not to be changed 

 by man, and that these lands, as they stand, and will forever stand, are not fit 

 for agricultural cultivation, except in rare localities along the water courses, but 

 are especially fitted for grazing and cattle growing, and in my judgment should. 



1 If this meteorological hypothesis is correct, then similar phenom.ena shoiild be found on 

 the other continents. 



Let us see if that is the case. 



The west winds which we have followed across North America, on leaving our eastern 

 shores, are cold, compact and dry, but as soon as they reach the tepid waters of the Gulf Stream, 

 they at once respond to their warming influence and rapidly expand, and in expanding, take up 

 by evaporation enormous quantities of water from the ocean, which they carry as invisible 

 vapor or fog eastwardly across the Atlantic, to clothe the British Islands and Western Europe 

 with their emerald robes of vegetation. Then that portion of them that is intercepted by the 

 Alps is chilled and contracted so as to cap these mountains with perpetual snow, encircle them 

 with profound lakes of marvelous beauty, and give birth to and feed the splendid system of 

 rivers which, radiating from this " Water Dome " of Europe, discharge their waters into all the 

 surrounding seas. Among these latter may be named the Elbe, Rhine, Saonne, Seine, Rhone, 

 Po, Adidge and Danube. 



The more northerly portion of these winds from the west, deflected somewhat by the Car- 

 pathian and Altai Mountains, pass eastwardly across Northern Russia and Siberia, and carry in 

 their wings the water that gives birth to and feeds the Obi, Yennessi, Lena, and other grand 

 streams that empty into the Arctic Ocean, and finally reach the Pacific as the cold, dry winds 

 first spoken of. 



It may be said, therefore, that the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic irrigates and fructifies the 

 continent of Europe and Northern Asia. 



Southern Asia receives its humidity from the tepid waters of the Indian Ocean, by means 

 of the northeast and southwest monsoons, which prevail there. 



Africa, being a tropical continent, is traversed by the trade winds, which blow from the 

 eastward. These winds, saturated with moisture by evaporation from the hot waters of the 

 great equatorial current that strikes the east coast of Africa, after its journey of 15,000 miles along 

 the Equator from the west coast of America, sustain the rauk vegetation which belts this conti- 

 nent in the tropical region, from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean ; crowns the mountains of the 

 Moon with the magnificent lakes of Albert and Victoria, Nyanza, Tanganika and others, and 

 keep in perennial flow from this " Water Dome " of Africa the majestic Nile, Congo and other 

 rivers radiating from thence to the surrounding seas. 



The great equatorial current of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, therefore, irrigates and fruc- 

 tifies the continent of Africa, through the agency of the trade winds. 



In the same way is South America irrigated and fructified from the equatorial current of 

 the Atlantic, by waters evaporated from it bj' the trade winds, from which their moisture is 

 wrung by the cold fianks and yet colder summits of the Andes, from M'hich flow into the Atlantic 

 waters, the Orinoco, the Amazon, and the Rio de la Plata, with their myriad of tributaries ; but 

 when these winds have scaled the Andes, the extreme cold of the latter has so contracted and 

 wrung from them all their moisture, that when they pitch down upon the west coast of Bolivia 

 and Peru, they are as rainless as those arid M'inds which cause the alkaline plains of Colorado 

 and New Mexico. 



