102 TWENTIETH ANNUAL REPORT ON THE STATE CABINET. 



warmth of his presence ; the cold winds are pushed and crowded 

 back on the pole and in the polar regions, until, of necessity, a 

 reaction takes place. Then, too, the winds that reach us at that 

 time from the pole, start in the midst jof the very depths of polar 

 winter, night and cold, when the air at the pole has reached its 

 lowest temperature. It passes on its way, as soon as it reaches 

 the sunlight at all, say in latitude 75 deg. or 80 deg., over accu- 

 mulated masses of ice and snow, and frozen ground ; all of which, 

 so soon as the rays of the sun become sufficient to cause the-m to 

 begin to thaw at all, need and will take up an immense amount 

 of heat as they pass from the solid state of ice into fluid as water. 

 Hence these winds have but little chance of orettino: warmed- ou 

 their way to us. They can scarcely grow warm at all, until they 

 get this side of snow and frost. Then of course they increase in 

 temperature quite rapidly, the earth over which they pass being 

 warmer in the da}' time than they are ; so that after they shtill 

 have reached latitudes some few degrees farther south than ouvs, 

 their chilling effects can (as I should presume) hardly be felt at 

 all. Nor, if my theory is correct, can anything of this kind be 

 observable in Europe or Asia ; not in our latitude south of the 

 great continental mountain range, because all lands south of it are 

 sheltered by them from the Avinds — not north of it to any conside- 

 rable extent — because the situation of the mountains arrests the 

 northward wave to which this is a mere reaction. And for the 

 same reason there can be no such phenomena on our Pacific coast. 

 And so with the autumn or Indian summer. The sun passing 

 southward into the southern hemisphere, draws after it a curtain 

 of darkness and cold as it passes along; but the earth in the 

 southern part of the temperate zone retains its warmth ; the polar 

 current having now more space by the extension of its area from 

 north to south, becomes thinner and remains the upper current 

 longer on its way to the equator than it otherwise would, thus 

 allowing the return current to pass under it as the surface cur- 

 rent, spreading the warmth of more southern latitudes over a belt 

 extending across the Atlantic ocean and as far west as the Rocky 

 mountains, and from north to south some ten or fifteen degrees 

 of latitude. But for the reasons already given, such a phenomenon 

 could hardly occur in the old world any more than that of the 

 summer frosts ; and it is doubtful also whether either of them 

 can occur to any observable extent anywhere in the southern 

 hemisphere. The effect of this wave and its reaction is doubtless 



