Jump to content

Page:Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology.djvu/162

From Wikisource
This page has been validated.
136
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE SEA, AND ITS METEOROLOGY.

begins to flow in with a most delightful and invigorating freshness.

315. Cause of land and sea breezes.—When a five is kindled on the hearth, we may, if we will observe the moats floating in the room, see that those nearest to the chimney are the first to feel the draught and to obey it—they are drawn into the blaze. The circle of inflowing air is gradually enlarged, until it is scarcely perceived in the remote parts of the room. Now the land is the hearth, the ray's of the sun the fire, and the sea, with its cool and calm air, the room; and thus we have at our firesides the sea breeze in miniature. "When the sun goes down the fire ceases; then the dry land commences to give off its surplus heat by radiation, so that by dew-fall it and the air above it are cooled below the sea temperature. The atmosphere on the land thus becomes heavier than on the sea, and, consequently, there is a wind seaward which we call the land breeze.

316. Lieut. [Marin H. Jansen|Jansen] on the land and sea breezes in the Indian Archipelago.—"A long residence in the Indian Archipelago, and, consequently, in that part of the world where the investigations of the Observatory at Washington have not extended, has given me," says Jansen,[1] in his Appendix to the Physical Geography of the Sea, "the opportunity of studying the phenomena which there occur in the atmosphere, and to these phenomena my attention was, in the first place, directed. I was involuntarily led from one research to another, and it is the result of these investigations to which I would modestly give a place at the conclusion of Maury's Physical Geography of the Sea, with the hope that these first-fruits of the log-books of the Netherlands may be speedily followed by more and better. Upon the northern coast of Java, the phenomenon of daily land and sea breezes is finely

  1. I have been assisted in my investigations into these phenomena of the sea by many thinking minds; among those whose debtor I am stands first and foremost the clear head and warm heart of a foreign officer, Lieutenant Marin Jansen, of the Dutch Navy, whom I am proud to call my friend. He has served many years in the East Indies, and has enriched my humble contributions to the "Physical Geography of the Sea" with contributions from the store-house of his knowledge, set off and presented in many fine pictures, and has appended them to a translation of the first edition of this work in the Dutch language. He has added a chapter on the land and sea breezes; another on the changing of the monsoons in the first Indian Archipelago: he has also extended his remarks to the north-west monsoon, to hurricanes, the south-cast trades of the South Atlantic, and to winds and currents generally.