Page:Cornwall; Cambridge county geographies.djvu/77

 THE COAST 61 charter by Henry VIII. Since that period the duty of erecting and maintaining lighthouses and other sea-marks has been entrusted to the Corporation by Royal Charter and Acts of Parliament. Trinity House maintains ten lighthouses about the coast of Cornwall, of which the most important, besides those of the Scilly Isles, are the Longships, white and red occulting ; the Wolf rock, white and red group flash ; the Lizard, white flash ; the Eddystone, white flash. 12. Climate Rainfall. The climate of a country or district is, briefly, the average weather of that country or district, and it depends upon various factors, all mutually interacting upon the latitude, the temperature, the direction and strength of the winds, the rainfall, the character of the soil, and the proximity of the district to the sea. The differences in the climates of the world depend mainly upon latitude, but a scarcely .less important factor is this proximity to the sea. Along any great climatic zone there will be found variations in proportion to this proximity, the extremes being " continental " climates in the centres of continents far from the oceans, and u insular " climates in small tracts surrounded by sea. Continental climates show great differences in seasonal temperatures, the winters tending to be unusually cold and the summers unusually warm, while the climate of insular tracts is characterised by equableness and also by