During the winter the Cape seems at times to be caught and tossed between the weather of the sea and that of the continent, but in general the principal air masses during fall and winter come from inland and in summer from the southwest. Winds from the north and west usually bring in continental polar air, which is dry and cold, though it may also arise in part from pacific maritime air. The source regions for many of the storms of early spring and early fall are the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Most of the severe spring storms, sometimes coming after a fairly mild winter, are the so-called “coastwise southeasters” which blow up the coast from off the Carolinas rather than from the west. They can result in blizzards because their coastal, maritime air if drawn into a low from the continent is cold enough to make snow. Such simple generalities and fact sampling is not to suggest, like the Chamber of Commerce, that more people ought to come to Cape Cod, but that it is a land like all others, which is influenced by the forces beyond it. It is no more gripped, pulled, and let go by the weather than most other areas. In fact its temperature made it a good place for the first English settlers to find. Think of the Middle West in July, or January, for extremes! Yet Cape Cod has a special place in the wind, an outside hold on the roaming of the seas and the advent of the air. The tides that rise and fall along this ocean-going spit of land are just as varied in their way as the weather, but more predictable. They accentuate the difference between one part of the Cape and another, and they are responsible for some of its physical characteristics. Great tidal ranges on the north side expose wide salt flats at low tide and allow the development of broad areas of salt marsh in sheltered embayments, whereas along the shores of Nantucket and Vineyard sounds, where tide ranges are much smaller, the marshes and more exposed flats are less extensive. In Cape Cod Bay and eastward to the coast of Maine the average tide rises and falls about nine feet, but in Nantucket and Vineyard sounds the range is up to four feet at the most, being as little as two feet off Woods Hole and in some of the salt ponds. The time of high water varies also. It occurs four hours later on the north side of the Cape than at Buzzards Bay. The Outer Beach is an area of transition so far as the tides are concerned, and their range drops steadily from nine feet at Race Point to four feet at the end of Monomoy. These diverse tides, all along the shores of the Cape, are a product of its very shape, and of the coast from which it juts out, astride the submerged continental shelf, whose shallow water also affects them.