

TKANSACTIONS, 



L— The Clyde Sea Area. By Hugh Robert Mill, D.Sc, F.R.S.E. (Plates I.-XXXII.) 



Part III. — Distribution of Temperature. 



(Read June 19, 1893.) 



Preliminary. 



The first two parts of this paper — Physical Geography and Salinity — were 

 communicated to the Society on May 18th, 1891, and published in the Transactions, 

 Vol. XXXVL, Part III., No. 23, pp. 641-729. 



Various circumstances have prevented me from sooner presenting the concluding 

 part of the discussion. I postponed publication again and again, in the hope that 

 it might be possible to discuss the results more thoroughly, and deduce from them 

 more clearly than I have been able to do the laws which regulate the heat-transactions 

 of sea-water of varying salinity, contained in basins of differing degrees of isolation 

 from the circulation of the ocean. At length the conclusion has been arrived at that 

 the observations are not sufficiently uniform, regular, and close to warrant the expendi- 

 ture of the time devoted to their discussion. Many months of work have been 

 occupied in proving that some special manner of classifying and treating the data led 

 to no definite result. Thus, it is unnecessary to describe several series of voluminous 

 calculations, or to bring forward a great number of maps and sections on which the 

 distribution of temperature was plotted in different ways. It is difficult to establish 

 theoretical conclusions of a general and far-reaching kind from my work, and I have 

 not attempted to compare it with the many memoirs published in continental journals, 

 on the temperature of lakes, fjords, and enclosed seas. During the last few years it has 

 only been possible for me to discuss the results in spare hours, snatched from the 

 engrossing occupations of University Extension lecturing, and literary work in other 

 departments of science, so that I have never been able to master simultaneously the 

 crowd of details, but obliged to treat each unit of the work separately, returning to it 

 often after weeks in which the earlier discussions had been partly forgotten. Thus the 



-VOL. XXXVIII. PART I. (NO. 1). A 



