“It would take a man 13,792 years to distribute this water, with a watering pot, supposing he distributed 6 hogsheads a day, and worked 300 days in a year.
“To distribute it in the same time as the clouds, half a day, would require 8,275,590 men, or more than twice as many as voted at the Presidential election of 1856, in the United States.
“It would take $6,206,692 to pay these men for their services, at the rate of $1.50 per day.
“If this water had all fallen to the earth in one solid mass, from a height of one mile, it would have struck the ground with a force of 3,389,512,500 tons.”
“There,” said Marcus, after reading aloud the foregoing record, “who would have imagined that the clouds were carrying on such an extensive business as that? Isn’t it wonderful? And then just think that this storm has extended over perhaps half of the United States. What a deluge of water must have fallen! And this, you must remember, is an account of only one storm—only three inches of rain, out of thirty or forty that we have every year.”
“Why! do we have as much rain as that in a year?” inquired Kate.
“Yes,” replied Marcus, “our average in this part of Vermont is, I believe, about thirty-two inches, including snow reduced to water. Along the sea coast they have more—in Boston, for instance, about forty inches. There are some parts of the world where they have almost as many feet of rain as we have inches, and nearly all of it falls in about two months of the year, too.”[[4]]
[4]. According to Prof. Guyot, rain falls at Paramaribo, in Dutch Guiana, to the amount of 229 inches, or 19 feet, annually. There is a place in Brazil where 276 inches, or 23 feet, have fallen in a year. But the greatest quantity ever observed is at an elevated point in British India, south of Bombay, where the enormous amount of 302 inches, or over 25 feet, has fallen in a year. At Cayenne, 21 inches of rain have been known to fall in a single day, or nearly as much as falls in a whole year in the northern latitudes. The annual average fall in tropical America, is 115 inches; in temperate America, 39 inches. The average for the entire surface of the globe is about five feet. These figures may afford the young arithmetician a basis for a variety of curious calculations, some rainy day, when he is at a loss for amusement, and is disposed to look a little more curiously into the wonderful results of “the rain power.”
“What do people do there? I should think they would be all washed away,” said Kate.
“No,” said Marcus, “it isn’t so bad as it seems. It is soon over with, and they have more pleasant days in the year than we do. I suppose they pity us because we have so many stormy days, and yet get so little rain after all. Besides, they know about when their rainy days are coming, and can be prepared for them.”