92 Mr. H. H. Howorth on 



relative distribution of sea and land since that epoch. All 

 our main continents and islands not only existed then as 

 they do now, but every year is adding to the amount of 

 evidence which goes to show that so recent, geologically 

 considered, is the glacial epoch that the very contour of the 

 surface was pretty much the same then as it is at present." 

 {Climate and Time, 9.) 



We have not yet done, however. Dr. Croll does not 

 argue that the warm equatorial current is diverted into 

 the Temperate and Arctic seas by the direct action of the 

 trade winds. He limits the direct action of those winds to 

 first creating it and then pushing it bodily across the equator 

 north or south, so as to confine it largely to one or other 

 hemisphere, as the south-east or north-east trade winds pre- 

 vail. It is quite clear, as he says, that the tendency of the 

 trade winds is limited to impelling the intertropical 

 waters along the line of the equator from east to west, 

 and were those regions not occupied in some places by 

 land, this equatorial current would flow directly round 

 the globe. Its westward progress, however, is arrested by 

 the two great continents, the old and the new. {Climate 

 and Time, 210). It is the presence of these continents, and 

 not the trade winds, which deflect these currents,and thelatter 

 move, after meeting with these barriers, along the lines of 

 least resistance. The impetus, no doubt, which causes their 

 movement is due to " the trades," but their deflection is due 

 to the distribution of land and water. 



As we shall show elsewhere, although there has been no 

 change in this distribution since so-called glacial times 

 which would shift the equator of heat to the south of the 

 equator of the earth, there has been such a change (and a 

 very slight one is needed) to affect the direction of some of 

 the currents (after they have been deflected) by the land. 

 What I wish to emphasize now is, that after the Gulf 

 Stream has traversed the Gulf of Mexico and reached 



