We are going to spend an hour to-day in following a drop of water
on its travels. If I dip my finger in this basin of water and
lift it up again, I bring with it a small glistening
drop out of the body of water below, and hold it before you. Tell
me, have you any idea where this drop has been? what changes it
has undergone, and what work it has been doing during all the
long ages that water has lain on the face of the earth? It is a
drop now, but it was not so before I lifted it out of the basin;
then it was part of a sheet of water, and will be so again if I
let it fall. Again, if I were to put this basin on the stove till
all the water had boiled away, where would my drop be then? Where
would it go? What forms will it take before it reappears in the
rain-cloud, the river, or the sparkling dew?
These are questions we are going to try to answer to-day; and
first, before we can in the least understand how water travels,
we must call to mind what we have learnt about the sunbeams and
the air. We must have clearly pictured in our imagination those
countless sun-waves which are for ever crossing space, and
especially those larger and slower undulations, the dark heat-
waves; for it is these, you will remember, which force the air-
atoms apart and make the air light, and it is also these which
are most busy in sending water on its travels. But not these
alone. The sun-waves might shake the water-drops as much as they
liked and turn them into invisible vapour, but they could not
carry them over the earth if it were not for the winds and
currents of that aerial ocean which bears the vapour on its
bosom, and wafts it to different regions of the world.
Let us try to understand how these two invisible workers, the
sun-waves and the air, deal with the drops of water. I
have here a kettle (Fig. 18, p. 76) boiling over a spirit-lamp,
and I want you to follow minutely what is going on in it. First,
in the flame of the lamp, atoms of the spirit drawn up from below
are clashing with the oxygen-atoms in the air. This, as you know,
causes heat-waves and light-waves to move rapidly all round the
lamp. The light-waves cannot pass through the kettle, but the
heat-waves can, and as they enter the water inside they agitate
it violently. Quicker, and still more quickly, the particles of
water near the bottom of the kettle move to and fro and are
shaken apart; and as they become light they rise through the
colder water letting another layer come down to be heated in its
turn. The motion grows more and more violent, making the water
hotter and hotter, till at last the particles of which it is
composed fly asunder, and escape as invisible vapour. If this
kettle were transparent you would not see any steam above the
water, because it is in the form of an invisible gas. But as the
steam comes out of the mouth of the kettle you see a cloud. Why
is this? Because the vapour is chilled by coming out into the
cold air, and its particles are drawn together again into tiny,
tiny drops of water, to which Dr. Tyndall has given the
suggestive name of water-dust. If you hold a plate over the steam
you can catch these tiny drops, though they will run into one
another almost as you are catching them.
The clouds you see floating in the sky are made of exactly the
same kind of water-dust as the cloud from the kettle, and I wish
to show you that this is also really the same as the invisible
steam within the kettle. I will do so by an experiment
suggested by Dr. Tyndall. Here is another spirit-lamp, which I
will hold under the cloud of steam - see! the cloud disappears!
As soon as the water-dust is heated the heat-waves scatter it
again into invisible particles, which float away into the room.
Even without the spirit-lamp, you can convince yourself that
water-vapour may be invisible; for close to the mouth of the
kettle you will see a short blank space before the cloud begins.
In this space there must be steam, but it is still so hot that
you cannot see it; and this proves that heat-waves can so shake
water apart as to carry it away invisibly right before your eyes.
Now, although we never see any water travelling from our earth up
into the skies, we know that it goes there, for it comes down
again in rain, and so it must go up invisibly. But where does the
heat come from which makes this water invisible? Not from below,
as in the case of the kettle, but from above, pouring down from
the sun. Wherever the sun-waves touch the rivers, ponds, lakes,
seas, or fields of ice and snow upon our earth, they
carry off invisible water-vapour. They dart down through the top
layers of the water, and shake the water-particles forcibly
apart; and in this case the drops fly asunder more easily and
before they are so hot, because they are not kept down by a great
weight of water above, as in the kettle, but find plenty of room
to spread themselves out in the gaps between the air-atoms of the
atmosphere.
Can you imagine these water-particles, just above any pond or
lake, rising up and getting entangled among the air-atoms? They
are very light, much lighter than the atmosphere; and so, when a
great many of them are spread about in the air which lies just
over the pond, they make it much lighter than the layer of air
above, and so help it to rise, while the heavier layer of air
comes down ready to take up more vapour.
In this way the sun-waves and the air carry off water everyday,
and all day long, from the top of lakes, rivers, pools, springs,
and seas, and even from the surface of ice and snow. Without any
fuss or noise or sign of any kind, the water of our earth is
being drawn up invisibly into the sky.
It has been calculated that in the Indian Ocean three-quarters of
an inch of water is carried off from the surface of the sea in
one day and night; so that as much as 22 feet, or a depth of
water about twice the height of an ordinary room, is silently and
invisibly lifted up from the whole surface of the ocean in one
year. It is true this is one of the hottest parts of the earth,
where the sun-waves are most active; but even in our
own country many feet of water are drawn up in the summer-time.
What, then, becomes of all this water? Let us follow it as it
struggles upwards to the sky. We see it in our imagination first
carrying layer after layer of air up with it from the sea till it
rises far above our heads and above the highest mountains. But
now, call to mind what happens to the air as it recedes from the
earth. Do you not remember that the air-atoms are always trying
to fly apart, and are only kept pressed together by the weight of
air above them? Well, so this water-laden air rises up, its
particles, no longer so much pressed together, begin to separate,
and as all work requires an expenditure of heat, the air becomes
colder, and then you know at once what must happen to the
invisible vapour, -- it will form into tiny water-drops, like the
steam from the kettle. And so, as the air rises and becomes
colder, the vapour gathers into the visible masses, and we can
see it hanging in the sky, and call it clouds. When these clouds
are highest they are about ten miles from the earth, but when
they are made of heavy drops and hang low down, they sometimes
come within a mile of the ground.
Look up at the clouds as you go home, and think that the water of
which they are made has all been drawn up invisibly through the
air. Not, however, necessarily here in London, for we have
already seen that air travels as wind all over the world, rushing
in to fill spaces made by rising air wherever they occur, and so
these clouds may be made of vapour collected in the
Mediterranean, or in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of America,
or even, if the wind is from the north, of chilly
particles gathered from the surface of Greenland ice and snow,
and brought here by the moving currents of air. Only, of one
thing we may be sure, that they come from the water of our earth.
Sometimes, if the air is warm, these water-particles may travel a
long way without ever forming into clouds; and on a hot,
cloudless day the air is often very full of invisible vapour.
Then, if a cold wind comes sweeping along, high up in the sky,
and chills this vapour, it forms into great bodies of water-dust
clouds, and the sky is overcast. At other times clouds hang
lazily in a bright sky, and these show us that just where they
are (as in Fig. 19) the air is cold and turns the invisible
vapour rising from the ground into visible water-dust, so that
exactly in those spaces we see it as clouds. Such clouds form
often on warm, still summer's day, and they are shaped like
masses of wool, ending in a straight line below. They are not
merely hanging in the sky, they are really resting upon a tall
column of invisible vapour which stretches right up from the
earth; and that straight line under the clouds marks
the place where the air becomes cold enough to turn this
invisible vapour into visible drops of water.