DRYING UP SLOWLY.

Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 2582, 17 April 1877, Page 2

DRYING UP SLOWLY.

Professor J. D. Whitney, in the last, number of the American Naturalist, shows that the popular notion that the destruction of forests much affects the quantity of rain, is erroneous. The records which have been kept of the height of waters in the Danube, Elbe, Rhine and other great Europep/i streams, show that they are carrying a lea's amount of water than formerly. The great lakes of Central Asia are now dried up, and the Humboldt country, once a vast lake, is now a dry basin. Still in a qualified way it is true that forests arrest evaporation, cool the ground by protecting it from the more direct rays of the sun, and in that way secure to a country a far greater degree of moisture titan it otherwise would have. But the denudation of forests does not account for the drying up of great lakes. Professor Whitney ascribes this change to solar causes, and his yiew is set forth in t the following summary:— , ; " The sun's heat is notoriously the source of all climates, and: changes in the amount of heat radiated from the sun are now regarded as causing the changes in terresti'ia'. weather. It is therefore reasonable to ascribe 6ur,drying-up, since it requires ages for its completion, to a change in the solar cause requiring also a long cycle for its fulfilment, provided that astronomy, gives us proof of any such change. And astronomy does tell us of two such cycles ; one in the obliquity of the elliptic, and one in the perihelion distance of the earth from the sud, both cycles being results of planetary perturbations of the earth's orbit;. The effect of the second of, these cycles is too abstruse to explain here; the first is simpler. \As the angle between the plane of the earth's equator and that of her orbit diminishes, the limits .of the torrid zone also diminish, inasmuch as that zone is bounded by the tropics which are determined by the angle in question. The' region, then, over which the sun is occasionally vertical is being narrowed. An obvious result of this narrowing would seem to be an intensification of the equatorial phenomena'of trade-winds, heat and rainfall within the torrid zone, anri a corresponding loss of heat and of precipitation in the extra-tropical zones.

But ir Wouldn't Do.-—A Louisianiah caught a negro carrying off some of hU fancy poultry the other night. "What are you doing with my chickens P" he yelled. " I wuzgwine ter fetch them back, boss; dere's a nigger roun' here what's been 'sputin' longer me 'bout dem chickuns. I said dey wuz Coaching Chinyz, an' he said dey r wuz Alabamar pullets, au' I wuz jes' takin' 'em roun* fey ter'stab! ish my nbl edge. Dey don't lay no. aigs, does dey, boss P Ef dey does, I'm mighty 'shamed er hustlin' ut 'em roun'. Aigs ia scase."— American paper.