Page:Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology.djvu/327

Rh gives them as much as they can take, and receives nothing back in return but a little dew (§ 376); the Persian Gulf also gives more than it receives. What becomes of the rest? Doubtless it is given to the winds, that they may bear it off to distant regions, and make lands fruitful, that but for these sources of supply would be almost rainless, if not entirely arid, waste, and barren. These seas and arms of the ocean now present themselves to the mind as counterpoises in the great hygrometrical machinery of our planet.—As sheets of water placed where they are to balance the land in the trade-wind region of South America and South Africa, they now present themselves. When the foundations of the earth were laid, the Great Architect "measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out the heavens with a span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, "and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance;" and hence we know that they are arranged both according to proportion and to place. Here, then, we see harmony in the winds, design in the mountains, order in the sea, arrangement for the dust, and form for the desert. Here are signs of beauty and works of grandeur; and we may now fancy that, in this exquisite system of adaptations and compensations, we can almost behold, in the Red and Mediterranean Seas, the very waters that were held in the hollow of the Almighty hand when He weighed the Andes and balanced the hills of Africa in the comprehensive scales. In that great inland basin of Asia which holds the Caspian Sea, and embraces an area of one million and a half of geographical square miles, we see the water-surface so exquisitely adjusted, that it is just sufficient, and no more, to return to the atmosphere as vapour exactly as much moisture as the atmosphere lends in rain to the rivers of that basin—a beautiful illustration of the fact that the span of the heavens was meted out according to the measure of the waters. Thus we are entitled to regard (§ 542) the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and Persian Gulf as relays, distributed along the route of these thirsty winds from the continents of the other hemisphere, to supply them with vapours, or to restore to them that which they have left behind to feed the sources of the Amazon, the Niger, and the Congo.

553. Hypothesis supported by facts.—The hypothesis that the winds from South Africa and America do take the course through Europe and Asia which I have marked out for them (Plate VII.), is supported by so many coincidences, to say the least, that we