RAIN.
Matar, . . . MIAs. Piaggia, . . . . IT.
Me, BURN. IluVia, SP Pluie, FR Mni, TAN.
Regen, GER I YaghMUT,. . . TURK.
Banat, . . HIND. I The occasional showers which fall throughout the year in Britain are unknown in most countries in S. Asia, and the first particular to attend to in examining their climates in connection with their agriculture, is the season and the quantity of the periodical rains. It is these which regulate hus bandry, and on which the temperature and suc cession of the seasons in a great measure depend. The globe is wrapped in a layer of air about 40 miles high ; and the manifold climates of the world are caused by the mutual relations of this layer of air and sea and land ; and the changes of weather, heat and cold, drought and rain, cloud and sunshine, calm and tempest, all depend upon the movements into which it may be thrown. When its temperature is lowered, the moisture in the air falls in rain, hail, or snow. In the tropics the sun's rays fall more vertically on the air than elsewhere, and its rarefied particles constantly rising form a column ever moving towards the poles. To fill the vacuum thus caused, the denser air from the frozen poles rushes down over the surface of the globe towards the equator, and hence result the great polar and equatorial air currents, the direct courses of which, between the poles and the equator, are bent by the revolution of the earth on its axis, in the northern hemi sphere into the north-east, and in the southern into the south-east trade-winds or vents alises. The wind goeth towards the south, and turneth about unto the north, it whirleth about continually, and returneth again according to its circuits.' The land becomes hotter and hotter more quickly under the sun's rays than the sea does, and the consequence is that when the sun becomes vertical over any portion of the land it draws the sur rounding aar to a focus there; and in this way in every latitude the great primary world-winds and rains are broken into secondary or local winds and rains, producing the differences in nature and time of the climates which prevail over the globe. Owing to the excess of land in the northern hemisphere, the constant belt of rain, where it exists between the trades, instead of correspond ing with the equator, lies a little to its north, and the moisture gathered by the south-east trades only falls in rain when it reaches the tropic of Cancer, thus compensating the northern hemi sphere for its want of evaporating surface. Similar modifications and compensations on a smaller scale occur in regard to each of the trades separ ately, as the. sun successively traverses the north and southern ecliptic.
In the tropical zone, the chief rainfall season occurs shortly after the sun attains its greatest altitude ; so that on and near 'the equator there are, as a rule, two seasons of maximum rainfall, and in the vicinity of the tropfcal circles the chief rain falls in the later summer months. In India, owing to its forming the southain extremity of a continent which extends far into the tropical zone, the periodical rainfall extends far to the north of the tropic of Cancer, with all its charac teristic tropical features.
In the greater part of extra-tropical India, the rains of the later winter months, although much less copious, are scarcely less important to agricul ture than those of the summer monsoon. This re mark is especially applicable to the Panjab, the N.W. Provinces, and the Northern Dekhan. The cause of these winter rains of India, is not well understood. They are supposed by /fr. H. F. Bland ford to be brought from the sea,by temporary winds.
In Assam and Bengal, and to a certain extent in the lower part of the N.W. Provinces, and in the Central Provinces to the east of Nagpur, as well as in the Peninsula farther south, some rain falls in the spring months. In the greater part of India proper these spring rains fall chiefly in little local storms, occasionally in the form of hail, but in Eastern Bengal and Assam the fall is more abundant and continuous. It begins in the latter part of March, and becomes more frequent and copious in the subsequent months, so that it even tually assumes the character of the monsoon rains; and it may be said that in the provinces of Eastern Assam and Bengal the monsoon rains set in six weeks or two months earlier than in the more western provinces. Lastly, in the Carnatic, the principal rainfall occurs at the close of the summer monsoon. But while the rains of this monsoon are falling heavily in N. India and on the west coast of the Peninsula, the plains of the Carnatic receive but a few occasional showers; and it is not until October, by which time the rains are over in Northern India and have ahnost ceased in Bengal, that the monsoon wind of the Bay of Bengal recurves, and, blowing as an east and north-east wind on the coast of Madras, carries to that part of the Peninsula the heaviest rain of the year. The amount of min is very different in different parts of India, more so than in any other parts of the world. If it were equally distributed over the whole country, it would, omitting Lower Bengal aud Assam, form a sheet of water about 35 inches in thickness (average rainfall 35 inches). In some parts of Cherrapunji the annual fall amounts to 400 inches ; while at Jacobabad and Sehwan the average does not exceed four or five inches, and in Sehwan in 1880 it was less than one inch. In the southern slopes of the Himalayas it is about 75 inches,...while in Western Rajputana, Sind, Clutch, and the Lower Panjab, it averages less than 15 inches in the year. In the western half of the Dekhan, on the Mysore plateau, and in the zone of country extending from Gujerat up the Arava111 mountains through Eastern Rajputana and the Gangetic Doab to the Panjab, the rainfall varies from 15 to 30 inches. But on some parts of the Western Ghats, as at Mahabaleswar and Matheran, the annual average is not less than 250 inches; while within a few miles to the eastward the rainfall rapidly- diminishes, so that at Poona it is only 31 inches, and the Western Dekhan plateau, which stretches away to Sholapur and beyond, has less than 30 inches.