by Mr. Wragge, a scientific voyager in the Hesperia, can be pretty accurately determined. During the month of May 1878, when the bottle was committed to the sea, the barometric observations in the Atlantic demonstrate the prevalence of a large area of high pressure (3020 inches) in the region south of the Azores, and around its northern side a strong band of westerly and north-westerly winds drawing in the anti-cyclonic direction. During the first twenty days of its voyage the bottle was under the pressure of these westerly and northerly winds, and the consequent ocean current which they induced, so that its inevitable course was toward the island of Madeira and the Canaries, and thence south-westwardly off the Cape Verd into the North Equatorial current In 1843, Captain Beecher, of the Royal Navy, charted a number of probable tracks pursued by bottles thrown out to test the rate of the equa torial currents, and the mean rate at which they travelled in this marine area was 10'6 miles per day. He found also that bottles thrown off into the North Equatorial drift travelled much slower than those started from points nearer the Equator, and in the axis of the north-east trade-wind belt Thus a bottle thrown over from the ship Racehorse in 12° 12' N. lat, and 65° 50' W. long., April 17,
1836, was picked up April 22 at Bonaire, having made 150 miles in five days. But a bottle thrown from the ship Dunmore in 1823, in 4' N. lat, and 28° W. long., on the north-eastern margin of the Sargasso Sea, reached Cuba, a distance of 3,200 miles, in 437 days, making on an average less than nine miles a day. The bottle from the Hesperia, just picked up on the Mexican Gulf coast., was ap proximately under the same wind and wave influences which bore the Dunmore's waif ; and hence the former, traversing the Equa torial current and passing through the Caribbean Sea into the Gulf of Mexico, making a total circuit of 5,500 miles, travelled at about the same mean rate—eight miles a day. This bottle cruise, per formed unnoticed amid the trackless wastes of the equatorial seas, though no living soul can tell its vicissitudes and variations from day to day, declares the regularity of oceanic circulation, and its history will be highly prized by navigators and geographers.")