[Sidenote: 
Wind S.W. and N.E. 
Temperature, 24 hours: 
  Mean greatest 85.1 deg
  Mean least 73.3 deg
Rain (inches) 11.2]

October is more unsettled, the wind veering towards the north, with pretty frequent rain; and as the sun is now far to the southward, the heat continues to decline.

[Sidenote: 
Wind N.E. 
Temperature, 24 hours: 
  Mean greatest 86.3 deg
  Mean least 71.5 deg
Rain (inches) 10.7]

November sees the close of the south-west monsoon and the arrival of the north-eastern.  In the early part of the month the wind visits nearly every point of the compass, but shows a marked predilection for the north, generally veering from N.E. at night and early morning, to N.W. at noon; calms are frequent and precede gentle showers, and clouds form round the lower range of hills.  By degrees as the sun advances in its southern declination, and warms the lower half of the great African continent, the current of heated air ascending from the equatorial belt leaves a comparative vacuum, towards which the less rarefied atmospheric fluid is drawn down from the regions north, of the tropic, bringing with it the cold and dry winds from the Himalayan Alps, and the lofty ranges of Assam.  The great change is heralded as before by oppressive calms, lurid skies, vivid lightning, bursts of thunder, and tumultuous rain.  But at this change of the monsoon the atmospheric disturbance is less striking than in May; the previous temperature is lower, the moisture of the air is more reduced, and the change is less agreeably perceptible from the southern breeze to the dry and parching wind from the north.

[Sidenote: 
Wind N.E. 
Temperature 24 hours: 
  Mean greatest 85 deg. 
  Mean least 70 deg. 
Rain (inches) 4.3]

December.—­In December the sun attains to its greatest southern declination, and the wind setting steadily from the northeast brings with it light but frequent rains from Bay Of Bengal.  The thermometer shows a maximum temperature of 85 deg. with a minimum of 70 deg.; the morning and the afternoon are again enjoyable in the open air, but at night every lattice that faces the north is cautiously closed against the treacherous “along-shore-wind.”

Notwithstanding the violence and volume in which the rains have been here described as descending during the paroxysms of the monsoons, the total rain-fall in Ceylon is considerably less than on the continent of Throughout Hindustan the annual mean is 117.5 and on some parts on the Malabar coast, upwards of 300 inches have fallen in a single year[1]; whereas the in Ceylon rarely exceeds 80, and the highest registered in an exceptional season was 120 inches.

[Footnote 1:  At Mahabaleshwar, in the Western Ghauts, the annual mean is 254 inches, and at Uttray Mullay; in Malabar, 263; whilst at Bengal it is 209 inches at Sylhet; and 610.3 at Cherraponga.]