RAINFALL IN NEBRASKA. 43 



rect in ascribing- to it a partially desert character. And yet even 

 then they could only have been partially correct. No desert can 

 support countless thousands of buffalo, elk, deer and antelope as 

 the plains of Nebraska did when Lewis and Clarke made their first 

 voyages of discovery up the Missouri. The probabilities are, that 

 those eminent explorers confounded the appearance of a section 

 closely pastured, and in some places made bare by the pasturing, 

 of those immense herds of buffalo of which they speak, with the 

 barrenness that a true desert always exhibits. A land that is sup- 

 plied with sufficient moisture in such a climate as this, to produce 

 food for such an affluence of animal life, can always be made avail- 

 able for the purposes of a high civilization. 



Causes that are Producing Increased Rainfall. 



Various reasons have been assigned to account for the increased 

 rainfall of the State. Some have maintained that the cause is secular 

 — that there are great periods when the moisture of a region in- 

 creases for ages independent of any human agency, and that when 

 it has reached a maximum it commences to decrease, which contin- 

 ue until it reaches a minimum. According to this theorv, this 

 region is now in a stage of increasing moisture. The advocates of 

 this theory point out the fact that the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and 

 Lake Mono, lying at the eastern foot of the Sierras, are both undoubt- 

 edly rising.* One of the objections to this theory is that the geo- 

 logical causes which produce increased rainfall, are not now spon- 

 taneously operative. Western America passed through many such 

 revolutions during the progress of the later geological ages, and 

 their causes are well understood. When, for example, the region 

 of the plains was much lower than at present, and were dotted 

 over with great fresh water lakes, a much moister climate than the 

 present must have prevailed. The country between this and the 

 Pacific is not now sinking- — it is rather rising at the rate, according 



o o o 



to Whitney, of a foot or two to the century. Denudation keeps 

 it at about the same level. L'nle^s therefore the cause is extra 

 terrestrial we cannot ascribe the increasing rainfall to merely secu- 

 lar changes. There are no cosmical causes definitely known that 

 would cause an increase of rainfall over an isolated region of the 

 earth. That cause, therefore, as a producer of increased rainfall 

 must also be dismissed. 



*0n Lake Mono see LeCutes' paper on the existence of volcanoes around Mono, read before 

 National Academy. April ISth, 1S79. 



