If there is anything that has been overlooked more than another it is our atmosphere. But it absolutely cannot be avoided--in books on the weather. It deserves a chapter, anyway, because if it were not for the atmosphere this earth of ours would be a wizened and sterile lump. It would float uselessly about in the general cosmos like the moon. To be sure the earth does not loom very large in the eye of the sun. It receives a positively trifling fraction of the total output of sunheat. So negligible is this amount that it would not be worth our mentioning if we did not owe our existence to it. It is thanks to the atmosphere, however, that the earth attains this (borrowed) importance. It is th…
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