air is supposed to rise and
create a suction which draws the trades on either side a distance of from
one thousand to two thousand miles, an average of three thousand miles in
all, at least, is not itself, on an average, over five hundred miles in
breadth from north to south. What a wonder of meteorology is here!

With a breadth of five hundred miles, the rising of the atmosphere is
supposed to be so rapid and of such immense volume that it draws the
surface atmosphere, one thousand to fifteen hundred miles on one side and
two thousand on the other, with a uniform steady velocity of twenty miles
per hour. Is this vast suction found by the unlucky mariner who may be
drawn within the vortex? _Not at all._ He finds no rapid suction there,
but _horizontal currents_, not steady, indeed, like the trades, and
sometimes calms _at the center_, but still the _currents are there_, and,
_except near the center, there as squalls, showers, and baffling winds
and as monsoons_.

Again, is there at the mouth of this vortex, or as you approach it, an
increased rapidity in the trade corresponding to the magnitude of its
influence? Does the trade become a hurricane as it approaches the spot
where it is to supply the place of that which has suddenly "expanded by
heat, and been forced to rise, boil over, and run off at the top in turn?"
Not at all. It blows gently, even up to the very line of the rainy belt,
and becomes squally and baffling, falls gradually calm near the center, or
changes to a monsoon.

But, again, the belt of rains is so far from being a belt of calms
strictly, that its monsoons in the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans,
at times, extend hundreds of miles out over the ocean. That of the
Atlantic, triangular, with its base resting on Africa, according to
Lieutenant Maury, extends sometimes almost to the coast of South America,
a distance of one thousand miles, and thus under the supposed ascending
vortex. Where is the great uprising suction during the prevalence of this
extensive surface horizontal monsoon beneath it? Manifestly it does not
exist. Nay, that monsoon is blowing from the warm current which sets up
from the Cape of Good Hope toward the Caribbean Sea, and over the cold
north polar current, which runs down between the continent and the Cape de
Verdes. Equally untrue is the presumption that the air rises over heated
portions of the earth elsewhere, and by reason of such heating.
_Perpendicular currents of the