In the temperate zones these results are not so immediately apparent. It is now much in doubt whether the climate of our country has changed its character within the last two hundred years. Jefferson and Dr. Rush both contended that it had. Our oldest inhabitants assert that in their day our winters began nearly two months earlier than they do now.
The general laws laid down in relation to rain are these:--
1. It decreases in quantity as we approach the poles.
2. It decreases as we pass from maritime to inland countries.
3. It decreases in the temperate zones on eastern coasts as compared with western coasts, but within the tropics it is the reverse.
4. More rain falls in mountainous than in level countries.
5. Most rain falls within the tropics.
The rainless regions, not deserts, are parts of Guatemala, the table-land of Mexico, the Peruvian coast, parts of Morocco, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, etc.
The electric character of the air is another subject of interest, and a leading one in Meteorology. What can be more magnificent, what more awful, than those storms of lightning and thunder which are witnessed sometimes even in our own latitudes?
Faraday, who as a chemist and philosophical writer is of the highest authority, professes to have demonstrated that one single gram of water contains as much electricity as can be accumulated in eight hundred thousand Leyden jars, each requiring to charge it thirty turns of the large machine at the Royal Institution.