136 MR. J. BAXENDELL : RELATIONS BETWEEN 



be regarded as a cooling process/' and I remarked " that 

 air nearly saturated with vapour had probably a greater 

 power of radiating heat than dry air/' a view which has 

 since been abundantly confirmed by the experiments of 

 Prof. Tyndall ; but it may^ nevertheless, be doubted whether 

 radiation alone will account for the whole of the cooling 

 effect indicated by the results of this inquiry ; and I may 

 therefore remark that some results of previous investiga- 

 tions of meteorological phenomena had led me to regard 

 it as very probable that a portion of the heat taken up 

 into the atmosphere by aqueous vapour is afterwards 

 expended in the production of atmospherical electricity, 

 and this probability seems to me to be considerably in- 

 creased by the results now obtained from the Geneva and 

 Great St. Bernard observations. 



From the relations established by this investigation, it 

 may also be concluded that in a mass of air moving 

 from a higher to a lower latitude and acquiring an in- 

 crease of temperature, the change of temperature is more 

 rapid in the lower than in the higher strata, while, on 

 the contrary, in a mass moving from a low to a high lati- 

 tude, and losing heat, the change is most rapid in the 

 upper strata. It also seems probable that one of the 

 essential conditions in the formation of a rotatory or cy- 

 clonic storm is a greater difference of temperature than 

 usual between the successive strata of the atmosphere at 

 the point where the storm originates. 



