Page:Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology.djvu/417

Rh up in winter and assisting to keep warm the extra-tropical regions of South America. Every traveller has remarked upon the mild climate of Patagonia and the Falkland Islands. "Temperature in high southern latitudes," says a very close observer, who is co-operating with me in collecting materials, "differs greatly from the temperature in northern. In southern latitudes there seems to be no extremes of heat and cold, as at the north. Newport, Rhode Island, for instance, latitude 41° north, longitude 71° west, and Rio Negro, latitude 41° south, and longitude 63° west, as a comparison: in the former, cattle have to be stabled and fed during the winter, not being able to get a living in the fields on account of snow and ice. In the latter, the cattle feed in the fields all winter, there being plenty of vegetation and no use of hay. On the Falkland Island (latitude 51-2° south), thousands of bullocks, sheep, and horses are running wild over the country, gathering a living all through the winter." The water in the equatorial caldron of Guinea overflows to the south, as that of St. Roque does to the north; it carries to Patagonia and the Falkland Islands warmth, which, uniting with the heat set free by precipitation during the passage of the vapour-laden west winds across the Southern Andes, carries beyond latitude 50° into the other hemisphere the winter climate of South Carolina on one side of the North Atlantic, or of the "Emerald Island " on the other.

730. Shore-lines.—All geographers have noticed, and philosophers have frequently remarked upon the conformity as to the shore-line profile of equatorial America and equatorial Africa. It is true, wt cannot now tell the reason, though explanations founded upon mere conjecture have been offered, why there should be this sort of jutting in and jutting out of the shore-line, as at Cape St. Roque and in the Gulf of Guinea, on opposite sides of the Atlantic; but one of the purposes, at least, which this peculiar configuration was intended to subserve, is without doubt now revealed to us. We see that, by this configuration, two cisterns of hot water are formed in this ocean, one of which distributes heat and warmth to western Europe; the other, at the opposite season, helps to temper the climate of eastern Patagonia. Phlegmatic must be the mind that is not impressed with ideas of grandeur and simplicity as it contemplates that exquisite design, those benign and beautiful arrangements, by which the climate of one hemisphere is made to depend upon the curve of that