But, again, the belt of rains is so far from being a belt of calms strictly, that its monsoons in the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, at times, extend hundreds of miles out over the ocean. That of the Atlantic, triangular, with its base resting on Africa, according to Lieutenant Maury, extends sometimes almost to the coast of South America, a distance of one thousand miles, and thus under the supposed ascending vortex. Where is the great uprising suction during the prevalence of this extensive surface horizontal monsoon beneath it? Manifestly it does not exist. Nay, that monsoon is blowing from the warm current which sets up from the Cape of Good Hope toward the Caribbean Sea, and over the cold north polar current, which runs down between the continent and the Cape de Verdes. Equally untrue is the presumption that the air rises over heated portions of the earth elsewhere, and by reason of such heating. _Perpendicular currents of the atmosphere are rarely seen, never extensive, or attaining any considerable altitude._ I have watched for them thirty years. I have seen currents of air ascend, with their moisture condensing as they ascended, and unite with the under surface of a highly electrified cloud--the advance condensation of a thunder shower--but that cloud was moving horizontally at a distance of from one to two thousand feet above the surface of the earth, and did not rise. I have seen patches of scud rising from the surface during the intervals of a showery and highly electrified storm, toward, and uniting with, the clouds above, when very low, as I have seen them approach and unite horizontally; and doubtless there is a tendency upwards of the wind, created and attracted by the summer shower, as may be seen in the ascending dust before the rain, but I have never been able to detect an ascending current, except as induced and attracted by a cloud above moving horizontally, in the hottest day or dryest time. None of the clouds of our climate, even when the earth is heated and parched by a two months' unbroken drought, can be detected rising above the strata in which they form. I have watched the cumuli at such periods when they filled the air, and can assert that they never rise. The atmosphere moves, invariably, in horizontal strata, and the whole theory of ascending currents is fallacious.