perature of the Gulf Stream and of the regions reached by it.

The Gulf Stream is the name given to a great body of water ever flowing northward from the equator towards the poles, in certain well-defined parts of the ocean. It is this stream which carries the temperature of summer, even in the dead of winter, as far north as the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The moisture deposited from the warmer air, on reaching colder atmosphere, is the cause of the fogs that commonly cloud that region.

The usual dampness of the British Islands, especially of Ireland, is due to this great ocean stream, which has at the same time the beneficent effect of tempering the cold of winter in north-western Europe. But for its influence the climate of Britain would be as rigorous as that of the coasts of Labrador, which are ever fast-bound in fetters of ice, though in the same latitude. Sometimes the harbour

of St. John's, Newfoundland, has been closed with ice as late as the month of June; yet who ever heard of the port of Liverpool, on the other side, though two degrees farther north, being closed with ice even in winter?

But while the Gulf Stream has this benign influence on the climate of Europe, it has often a disastrous effect on the atmosphere of the ocean. Captain Maury, to whom science. owes much of its knowledge of ocean currents, says that "the Gulf Stream is, to use a sailor expression, the great weather-breeder" of the North Atlantic Ocean. The most furious gales sweep along with it; and the dense fogs of the north, which so much endanger navigation in winter, doubtless owe their existence to the presence, in that cold sea, of immense volumes of warm water brought by the Gulf Stream.

Sir Philip Brooke found the air on each side of it at the freezing point, while that of

its waters was 80° of Fahrenheit. The heavy, warm, damp air over the current caused great irregularity in his chronometers. The excess of heat daily brought northward by the waters from the tropics would, if suddenly set free, be sufficient to make the column of superincumbent atmosphere hotter than molten iron. With such an element of atmospherical disturbance in its bosom, we might expect storms of the most violent kind to accompany it in its course. Accordingly, the most terrific that rage on the ocean have been known to be near its borders. Some of these great storms begin far away in the tropics, and travel northwards as cyclones, their force not always being spent before reaching the shores of western Europe.

These are the disturbances, the existence and passage of which are now regularly telegraphed from America, and of which due notice appears in the weather-warnings of the

meteorological tables published in our daily papers. But apart from these great hurricanes, some of which have left dark records in history, there are constant disturbances caused by the varying temperature of the ocean, rendering the weather of the Northern Atlantic always changeable and uncertain.

'Since the introduction of steam navigation the dangers of the Atlantic have been greatly lessened, although disasters when they do occur are of a magnitude unknown before. The first steamer that crossed the Atlantic was the "Sirius," in 1838, the year after the accession of Queen Victoria. In the year 1841 the first great disaster occurred, in the mysterious and still unexplained disappearance of the "President." The latest account we have of her is that she left New York on the 11th of March, having on board, among many passengers, a son of the Duke of Richmond, the Rev. B. Cookman, and Mr. Power,

a popular author and actor of Irish characters. Whether the ill-fated vessel was overwhelmed

in a tempest, like the "Cambria" in 1870, or caught fire like the "Amazon" in 1852, or was run down by another vessel like the "Ville de Havre" in 1873, will never now be known. As icebergs are rarely met with in the course she would have taken, this could hardly have been the cause of her doom, although sometimes a real source of danger.

We read, for instance, in the month of April of this year, that on her way to New York the Belgian steamer "Ferdinand Van der Taelan," Captain Catloor, was laid to on the night of the 18th ult., owing to the presence of ice in the Atlantic. At daybreak, the weather being clear and very cold, a tremendous iceberg was observed towering over the deck of the steamer. Measurements taken by means of the sextant showed