1849.] 



exercised by Trees on Climate. 



well observe that these districts are more destitute of trees than 

 any part of Scotland he ever saw, and that the traveller scarcely 

 meets with one in fifty miles and no where with a clump of fifty.* 

 In Bellary the heat and glare are excessive. 



Incidental remarks are met with in the writings of many au= 

 thors showing how closely, from their observations, the purity, 

 humidity and temperature of the atmosphere, and the supply of 

 water on the earth's surface depend on the foliage of trees ; and, 

 indeed, I would have hesitated to have thrown these few notes 

 together were the facts less numerous than we find them, or in 

 any way doubtful, but we can form from many of -them no other 

 conclusion than that the abundant or scanty supply of rain 

 depends on the number or scarcity of trees, and that the quan- 

 tity of rain which falls alters as the trees are diminished or in- 

 creased. 



AU who have travelled over a bare sandy tract in a tropical 

 country and breathed the dry irritating air lying over it must re- 

 member the great relief experienced on gaining the shade of a 

 clump of trees or even of a solitary tree, and it is easy for such 

 travellers to understand the beneficial eflect that the cooler air, 

 there, must exert on the neighbouring vegetation, 



AUuding to the unhealthiness of Hong Kong, ^Fortune, in his 

 "Wanderings"! remarks that his own observations had led him to 

 the following conclusions. Much of the sickness and mortality 

 doubtless proceeded from the imperfect construction and damp- 

 ness of the houses in which our people were obliged to live when 

 the colony was first formed, and a great deal may be also attribut- 

 ed to the fierce and burning rays of the Hong Kong sun. All 

 the travellers in the East with whom I had any conversation on 

 the subject agreed that there was a fierceness and oppressiveness 

 in the sun's rays, here, which they never experienced in any other 

 parts of the tropics, even under the line ; I have no doubt that 

 this is caused by the want of luxuriant vegetation and the conse= 

 quent reflection of the sun's rays. The bare and barren rocks 

 and soil reflect every ray that strikes them ; there are no trees or 

 bushes to afford shade or to decompose the carbonic acid and ren- 



* Captain Newbold in Madras Journal of Literature and Science, No= 24, p= I2i". 

 t Fortune's Wanderings in Chiaa, 1847, p. 26. 



yoii. ZY. so, XXXVI, ^ 1 



