Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 2.djvu/268

236 the current; those floating at intermediate depths would serve to show more nearly the joint effects of both. The vicinity of Cape Horn was considered by me an eligible locality for one of these experiments; and I mention it more especially here on account of one of the bottles having been found near Cape Liptrap, in the neighbourhood of Port Philip, Australia, about the middle of September, 1845. The notice of the circumstance, which was first published in the Port Philip Herald, was copied into the Scotsman, from which paper of the 26th August, 1846, the interesting particulars of the course and distance the bottle had drifted have been extracted and placed in the appendix. The editor observes: "That the motion of the bottle must have been eastward, and assuming that it had newly reached the strand, when discovered, it had passed from the vicinity of Cape Horn to Port Philip, a distance of nine thousand miles, in three years and a half. But it could not be supposed that its course was exactly straight; and, if we add a thousand miles for detours, it follows that the current which carried it moved at the rate of eight miles per day."

As no mention was made of any sand being in the bottle when found, it was doubtless the lightest of the five which I threw overboard this evening, and had been hurried forward on its course by the strong westerly winds which blow in the parallel of latitude it had traversed, with much greater force, and with almost equal constancy, as do the