A History of Science - v.3 (Williams)

atmosphere, the effect of an outside shutter on the temperature of the glass of the window will be directly opposite to what has just been stated; since it must prevent the radiation, into the atmosphere, of the heat of the chamber transmitted through the glass.

"2. Count Rumford appears to have rightly conjectured that the inhabitants of certain hot countries,

who sleep at nights on the tops of their houses, are cooled during this exposure by the radiation of their

heat to the sky; or, according to his manner of expression, by receiving frigorific rays from the heavens.

Another fact of this kind seems to be the greater chill which we often experience upon passing at night from the cover of a house into the air than might have been expected from the cold of the external atmosphere.

The cause, indeed, is said to be the quickness of transition from one situation to another. But if this were

the whole reason, an equal chill would be felt in the day, when the difference, in point of heat, between the internal and external air was the same as at night, which

is not the case. Besides, if I can trust my own observation, the feeling of cold from this cause is more remarkable

in a clear than in a cloudy night, and in the country than in towns. The following appears to be

the manner in which these things are chiefly to be explained:

"During the day our bodies while in the open air,

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

to us from the sun round buildings.

To our loss of heat by radiation at times that we derive little compensation from the radiation of other bodies is probably to be attributed a great part of the hurtful effects of the night air. Descartes says that these are not owing to dew, as was the common opinion of his contemporaries, but to the descent of certain noxious vapors which have been exhaled from the earth

during the heat of the day, and are afterwards condensed by the cold of a serene night. The effects in

question certainly cannot be occasioned by dew, since that fluid does not form upon a healthy human body

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

in temperate climates; but they may, notwithstanding, arise from the same cause that produces dew on those substances which do not, like the human body, possess the power of generating heat for the supply of what they lose by radiation or any other means."[2]

This explanation made it plain why dew forms on a

clear night, when there are no clouds to reflect the radiant heat. Combined with Dalton's theory that vapor

is an independent gas, limited in quantity in any given space by the temperature of that space, it solved the problem of the formation of clouds, rain, snow, and hoar-frost. Thus this paper of Wells's closed the epoch of speculation regarding this field of meteorology, as Hutton's paper of 1784 had opened it. The fact that

the volume containing Hutton's paper contained also his epoch-making paper on geology finds curiously a duplication in the fact that Wells's volume contained also his essay on Albinism, in which the doctrine of

natural selection was for the first time formulated, as Charles Darwin freely admitted after his own efforts had made the doctrine famous.

ISOTHERMS AND OCEAN CURRENTS

The very next year after Dr. Wells's paper was published

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

there appeared in France the third volume of

the Memoires de Physique et de Chimie de la Societe d'Arcueil, and a new epoch in meteorology was inaugurated. The society in question was numerically an inconsequential

band, listing only a dozen members; but every name was a famous one: Arago, Berard, Berthollet, Biot, Chaptal, De Candolle, Dulong, Gay-Lussac, Humboldt, Laplace, Poisson, and Thenard--rare spirits every one. Little danger that the memoirs of such a band would be relegated to the dusty shelves where most proceedings of societies belong--no milk-for-babes fare would be served to such a company.

The particular paper which here interests us closes this third and last volume of memoirs. It is entitled "Des Lignes Isothermes et de la Distribution de la Chaleursurle Globe." The author is Alexander Humboldt. Needless to say, the topic is handled in a masterly manner. The distribution of heat on the surface of the globe, on the mountain-sides, in the interior of the earth; the causes that regulate such distribution; the climatic results--these are the topics discussed. But

what gives epochal character to the paper is the introduction of those isothermal lines circling the earth in

irregular course, joining together places having the same mean annual temperature, and thus laying the foundation for a science of comparative climatology.

It is true the attempt to study climates comparatively was not new. Mairan had attempted it in those

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

papers in which he developed his bizarre ideas as to central emanations of heat. Euler had brought his profound mathematical genius to bear on the topic, evolving the "extraordinary conclusion that under the equator at midnight the cold ought to be more rigorous than at the poles in winter." And in particular Richard Kirwan, the English chemist, had combined the mathematical and the empirical methods and calculated temperatures for all latitudes. But Humboldt

differs from all these predecessors in that he grasps the idea that the basis of all such computations should be not theory, but fact. He drew his isothermal lines not where some occult calculation would locate them on an

ideal globe, but where practical tests with the thermometer locate them on our globe as it is. London,

for example, lies in the same latitude as the southern extremity of Hudson Bay; but the isotherm of London, as Humboldt outlines it, passes through Cincinnati.

Of course such deviations of climatic conditions between places in the same latitude had long been known.

As Humboldt himself observes, the earliest settlers of

America were astonished to find themselves subjected

to rigors of climate for which their European experience had not at all prepared them. Moreover, sagacious travellers, in particular Cook's companion on his second voyage, young George Forster, had noted as a general principle that the western borders of continents in

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

temperate regions are always warmer than corresponding latitudes of their eastern borders; and of course the general truth of temperatures being milder in the vicinity of the sea than in the interior of continents had

long been familiar. But Humboldt's isothermal lines

for the first time gave tangibility to these ideas, and made practicable a truly scientific study of comparative climatology.

In studying these lines, particularly as elaborated by further observations, it became clear that they are by no means haphazard in arrangement, but are dependent upon geographical conditions which in most cases

are not difficult to determine. Humboldt himself pointed out very clearly the main causes that tend to produce deviations from the average--or, as Dove

later on called it, the normal--temperature of any given latitude. For example, the mean annual temperature

of a region (referring mainly to the northern hemisphere) is raised by the proximity of a western coast;

by a divided configuration of the continent into peninsulas; by the existence of open seas to the north or of

radiating continental surfaces to the south; by mountain ranges to shield from cold winds; by the infrequency

of swamps to become congealed; by the absence

of woods in a dry, sandy soil; and by the serenity of sky in the summer months and the vicinity of an ocean current bringing water which is of a higher temperature than that of the surrounding sea.

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

Conditions opposite to these tend, of course, correspondingly to lower the temperature. In a word, Humboldt says the climatic distribution of heat depends on the relative distribution of land and sea, and

on the "hypsometrical configuration of the continents"; and he urges that "great meteorological phenomena cannot be comprehended when considered independently

of geognostic relations"--a truth which,

like most other general principles, seems simple enough once it is pointed out.

With that broad sweep of imagination which characterized him, Humboldt speaks of the atmosphere as the

"aerial ocean, in the lower strata and on the shoals of which we live," and he studies the atmospheric phenomena always in relation to those of that other ocean

of water. In each of these oceans there are vast permanent currents, flowing always in determinate directions,

which enormously modify the climatic conditions

of every zone. The ocean of air is a vast maelstrom, boiling up always under the influence of the sun's heat at the equator, and flowing as an upper current towards either pole, while an undercurrent from the poles, which becomes the trade-winds, flows towards the equator to supply its place.

But the superheated equatorial air, becoming chilled,

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

descends to the surface in temperate latitudes, and continues its poleward journey as the anti-trade-winds.

The trade-winds are deflected towards the west, because in approaching the equator they constantly pass

over surfaces of the earth having a greater and greater velocity of rotation, and so, as it were, tend to lag behind-- an explanation which Hadley pointed out in

1735, but which was not accepted until Dalton independently worked it out and promulgated it in 1793.

For the opposite reason, the anti-trades are deflected towards the east; hence it is that the western, borders of continents in temperate zones are bathed in moist sea-breezes, while their eastern borders lack this colddispelling influence.

In the ocean of water the main currents run as more sharply circumscribed streams--veritable rivers in the

sea. Of these the best known and most sharply circumscribed is the familiar Gulf Stream, which has its

origin in an equatorial current, impelled westward by trade-winds, which is deflected northward in the main at Cape St. Roque, entering the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, to emerge finally through the Strait of Florida, and journey off across the Atlantic to warm the shores of Europe.

Such, at least, is the Gulf Stream as Humboldt understood it. Since his time, however, ocean currents in

general, and this one in particular, have been the subject

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

of no end of controversy, it being hotly disputed whether either causes or effects of the Gulf Stream are just what Humboldt, in common with others of his

time, conceived them to be. About the middle of the century Lieutenant M. F. Maury, the distinguished American hydrographer and meteorologist, advocated

a theory of gravitation as the chief cause of the currents, claiming that difference in density, due to difference

in temperature and saltness, would sufficiently account for the oceanic circulation. This theory gained great popularity through the wide circulation

of Maury's Physical Geography of the Sea, which is said to have passed through more editions than any other scientific book of the period; but it was ably and vigorously combated by Dr. James Croll, the Scottish geologist, in his Climate and Time, and latterly the old theory that ocean currents are due to the trade-winds has again come into favor. Indeed, very recently a

model has been constructed, with the aid of which it is said to have been demonstrated that prevailing winds

in the direction of the actual trade-winds would produce such a current as the Gulf Stream.

Meantime, however, it is by no means sure that gravitation does not enter into the case to the extent of producing an insensible general oceanic circulation, independent of the Gulf Stream and similar marked

currents, and similar in its larger outlines to the polar-

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

equatorial circulation of the air. The idea of such oceanic circulation was first suggested in detail by Professor Lenz, of St. Petersburg, in 1845, but it was not generally recognized until Dr. Carpenter independently hit upon the idea more than twenty

years later. The plausibility of the conception is obvious; yet the alleged fact of such circulation has

been hotly disputed, and the question is still sub judice.

But whether or not such general circulation of ocean

water takes place, it is beyond dispute that the recognized currents carry an enormous quantity of heat

from the tropics towards the poles. Dr. Croll, who has perhaps given more attention to the physics of the subject than almost any other person, computes that the Gulf Stream conveys to the North Atlantic one-

fourth as much heat as that body receives directly from

the sun, and he argues that were it not for the transportation of heat by this and similar Pacific currents,

only a narrow tropical region of the globe would be warm enough for habitation by the existing faunas. Dr. Croll argues that a slight change in the relative values of northern and southern trade-winds (such as he believes has taken place at various periods in the

past) would suffice to so alter the equatorial current which now feeds the Gulf Stream that its main bulk would be deflected southward instead of northward,

by the angle of Cape St. Roque. Thus the Gulf Stream

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com