arger portion stagnates in the
circumpolar region, in time slowly to return to the tropical district
in a manner afterward to be described. Although the Gulf Stream in the
region north of Cape Hatteras is so indistinct that its presence was
not distinctly recognised until the facts were subjected to the keen
eye of Benjamin Franklin, its effects in the way of climate are so
great that we must attribute the fitness of northern Europe for the
uses of civilized man to its action. But for the heat which this
stream brings to the realm of the North Atlantic, Great Britain would
be as sterile as Labrador, and the Scandinavian region, the
cradle-land of our race, as uninhabitable as the bleakest parts of
Siberia.

It is a noteworthy fact that when the equatorial current divides on
the continents against which it flows, the separate streams, although
they may follow the shores for a certain distance toward the poles,
soon diverge from them, just as the Gulf Stream passes to the seaward
from the eastern coast of the United States. The reason for this
movement is readily found in the same principle which explains the
oblique flow of the trades and counter trades in their passage to and
from the equatorial belt. The particle of water under the equator,
though it flows to the west, has, by virtue of the earth's rotation,
an eastward-setting velocity of a thousand miles an hour. Starting
toward the poles, the particle is ever coming into regions of the sea
where the fluid has a less easterly movement, due to the earth's
rotation on its axis. Consequently the journeying water by its
momentum tends to move off in an easterly course. Attaining high
latitudes and losing its momentum, it abides in the realm long enough
to become cooled.

We have already noted the fact that only a portion of the waters sent
northward in the Gulf Stream and the other currents which flow from
the equator to the poles is returned by the surface flow which sets
toward the equator along the eastern side of the basins. The largest
share of the tide effects its return journey in other ways. Some
portion of this remainder sets equatorward in local cold streams, such
as that which pours forth through Davis Strait into Baffin Bay,
flowing under the Gulf Stream waters for an unknown distance toward
the tropics. There are several of these local as yet little known
streams, which doubtless bring about a certain amount of circulation
between the polar regions and th