lost in the gulf of Mexico, or in the forest
lakes of the wild West.

Perhaps, therefore, whenever a cycle occurs in which north-east winds
prevail during a year or a series of years, the lakes lose their level,
for, their direction being north-east and south-west, such is the usual
current of the air; and therefore either north-east or south-westerly
winds are the usual ones which pass over their surface.

The parts of the great inland navigation which suffer most in these
periodical depressions are the St. Clair River and the shallow parts of
those extensions of the St. Lawrence called Lakes St. Francis and St.
Peter, which in the course of time will cause, and indeed in the latter
already do cause, some trouble and some anxiety.

The north winds, keen and cold, do not deposit much in the valley of the
lakes, whose southern borders are usually too low also to prevent the
passage of rain-bearing clouds.

From that portion of the dividing ridge between the valleys of the St.
Lawrence and Mississippi, only seven miles from Lake Erie, says an
American writer, there is to Fort Wayne, at the head of the Maumee
river, one hundred miles from the same lake, a gradual subsidence of the
land from 700 to less than 200 feet.

From Fort Wayne westward this dividing ridge rises only one hundred and
fifty feet, and then gradually subsides to the neighbourhood of the
south-west of Lake Michigan, where it is but some twenty feet above the
level of that water.

The basin of the Mississippi, including its great tributary streams,
receives therefore a very great portion of the falling vapour, from all
the winds blowing from north to north-east.

The same reasoner agrees with the views which I have expressed
respecting the probability of the supply to raise the level, which must
be the great feeder derived from the south and south-westward invariably
rainy winds, when of long continuance, in the basin of the St.
Lawrence, and generated by the gulf stream in its gyration through the
Mexican Bay, being heaped up from the trade wind which causes the
oceanic current, and forces its heated atmosphere north and north-east,
by the rebound which it takes from the vast Cordilleras of Anahuac and
Panama; thus depositing its cooling showers on the chain of the fresh
water seas of Canada, condensed as they are by the natural air-currents
from the icy regions of the western Andes of Oregon, and the cold
breezes from the still more gelid countr