Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/480

456  makes up for evaporation less than it does over the Atlantic; and thirdly, supposing these two questions answered affirmatively: Are not these sources of loss in the Mediterranean fully covered by the prodigious quantity of fresh water which is poured into it by great rivers and submarine springs? Consider that the water of the Ebro, the Rhine, the Po, the Danube, the Don, the Dnieper, and the Nile, all flow directly or indirectly into the Mediterranean; that the volume of fresh water which they pour into it is so enormous that fresh water may sometimes be baled up from the surface of the sea off the Delta of the Nile, while the land is not yet in sight; that the water of the Black Sea is half fresh, and that a current of three or four miles an hour constantly streams from it Mediterraneanward through the Bosporus; consider, in addition, that no fewer than ten submarine springs of fresh water are known to burst up in the Mediterranean, some of them so large that Admiral Smyth calls them "subterranean rivers of amazing volume and force;" and it would seem, on the face of the matter, that the sun must have enough to do to keep the level of the Mediterranean down; and that, possibly, we may have to seek for the cause of the small superiority in saline contents of the Mediterranean water in some condition other than solar evaporation.

Again, if the Gibraltar indraught is the effect of evaporation, why does it go on in winter as well as in summer?

All these are questions more easily asked than answered; but they must be answered before we can accept the Gibraltar stream as an example of a current produced by indraught, with any comfort.

The Mediterranean is not included in the Challenger's route, but she will visit one of the most promising and little explored of hydrographical regions—the North Pacific, between Polynesia and the Asiatic and American shores; and, doubtless, the store of observations upon the currents of this region, which she will accumulate, when compared with what we know of the North Atlantic, will throw a powerful light upon the present obscurity of the Gulf Stream problem.—Contemporary Review.



HE importance of milk as an article of diet is so great that any thing offered as a substitute for it, or that renders it more available as food, demands attention. The composition of cow's milk is so nearly like woman's milk that the addition of a little water and sugar may be said to convert the one into the other; hence the practice of giving cow's milk to young children, and making it a substantial 