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necessary was not so much more food itself, as the means of its distribution. 
India is now deriving great benefit in this way from the railways that have 
been constructed over the country, which convey the food wanted to those 
parts where famine exists. This combined use of camels and railways may 
be expected to do much for the prosperity of India. 
Mr. D. Howard, F.C.S. — Mr. Bateman’s interesting paper has brought 
before us the great problem of the rainfall— the tendency to diminution from 
West to East. Sir Joseph Fayrer has interestingly supplemented Mr. Bate- 
man’s paper by explaining how the monsoons charged with wet, as they are 
on reaching the coasts of India, completely part with their moisture, so as 
actually to leave some parts of the country almost arid for want of the rain 
which has been extracted from them in their passage over the Ghauts. This 
occurs in India only at one period of the year ; but, of course, it is exactly 
the same sort of process that goes on constantly in Switzerland. There von 
find two kinds of south wind. There is an intensely wet south wind, which 
in a small way imitates what we have heard of the Indian rainfall ; and 
you also get what is called the Fohn wind, which is so hot in certain parts of 
the country that it has occasionally led to the destruction of villages, which 
have been burnt down in the Swiss valleys. The wind is so unaccountably 
dry and parching, that when the Fohn begins, the houses being built of wood, 
a fire will quickly spread from one to another. It was a puzzle to the Swiss 
meteorologists how it could be that this south wind, which is usually a wet 
wind, could, in certain places, be so intensely dry. 'I he idea was that it was 
a sirocco, though how a sirocco could pass over some valleys and confine its 
work to those parts which suffered from the Fohn wind was not explained ; 
but it was found that, after all, it was the same wind which was first so wet 
and then so dry. The south wind blows up the southern side of the Alps, 
and deposits all its moisture before it passes the top of the Alps, in an 
exceedingly rarified condition. As it descends, and the rarification 
becomes condensation, the air becomes hot, but there is no moisture for it to 
take up, and it consequently arrives in the valleys almost absolutely dry. 
So that we have this state of things, that the intense dryness, which is a 
danger on the one side, is brought by the same wind which causes the great 
floods of the Rhone Valley on the other side. This is one example of what 
has caused such great effects, and on so vast a scale, in India. It is an effect 
repeated on a smaller scale in the difference that exists between the great 
dampness noticed on the western side of England, and the dryness of the 
other side. There is one point I should like to put to the author, and that is, 
Whether he has gone into the question of the cycles of rainfall, — whether 
he thinks the sun-spots, of which we have heard so much, have any connexion 
with our recent rainy seasons ? Of course, these sun-spots are connected 
with certain phenomena of terrestrial magnetism, and so forth ; but what I 
want to ask is, whether any clear connexion has been made out between 
the cycles of the sun-spots and the cycles of rainfall ? 
Mr. Bateman. — In answer to the question just put, I may say that I have 
already stated that we have not, up to the present time, been able to reduce 
