THE WEATHER VS. THE NEWSPAPERS. 385 



The simplest study of the invariable facts shows that the tornado is 

 a small eddy, superinduced under favorable meteorological and topo- 

 graphical conditions in the outer circulation (southwest to southeast 

 quadrant) of a general low area disturbance (cyclone). It is of extreme 

 intensity, the rotary motion of its winds around the central core 

 (vortex) being inconceivably swift (100 to 500 and perhaps 1,000 

 miles an hour), but is limited as to duration — it lasts, at the longest, 

 but a few hours; limited as to the width of path, this may vary from 

 fifty to five hundred yards, one of a mile in width being exceptional, 

 and limited as to the length of track, which if it exceeds 100 miles is 

 unusual. Now, a cyclone is continental in magnitude, and may travel 

 for weeks, going two-thirds of the way around the globe. Just as the 

 cyclone's path is determined by interaction of barometric stresses in the 

 general drift of the whole atmosphere, so the path of tornadoes 

 is determined by the interaction of currents in the cyclonic drift. 

 Individual tornadoes do not cross the country intact, as so many weather 

 quacks prophesy, but the parent cyclone that conditions a number of 

 them in the Western States one day, having traveled further east the 

 next day, if local conditions allow, may superinduce similar local out- 

 bursts in the Middle States. 



Thunder-storms, as a rule, are familiar enough and definite enough 

 to escape the general muddlement, but even they have not escaped the 

 tendency to 'cyclonize' every weather phenomenon. Hence the old- 

 fashioned thunder-gust, the familiar straight outrush of the thunder 

 squall, sometimes destructive, figures nowadays as a 'cyclone,' a 

 'tornado,' or mayhap a 'hurricane.' Not only this, but the thunder- 

 storms that occur along the line of change from the warm front of a 

 cyclone to the cooler rear — a cool anti-cyclone following — are accused 

 of causing the anti-cyclone when they are an effect of the advancing 

 anti-cyclone and not its cause, any more than the cow-catcher is the 

 cause of the approach of a train. 



Above all, the most extraordinary pother and confusion prevail 

 over another storm type, the hurricane or tropical cyclone. Here the 

 newspapers are seconded in their obscurantism by writers of books on 

 the West Indies or the Philippines, all of whom should know better, or 

 could know better if they only so elected. The hurricane — the typhoon 

 is its Asian congener — though the smallest of cyclones, since its 

 diameter usually ranges from 100 to 500 miles, is easily differentiated 

 from the biggest tornado, since the latter^ diameter at the greatest 

 barely reaches one mile. As the tornado in its narrow swath kills tens 

 and hundreds, so the hurricane, with vast areas of sea and land 

 swept by the besom of its great winds and washed by its tremendous 

 storm wave, runs the death total up to the hundreds and thousands. 

 The hurricane does not originate in the circumpolar drift, but is a 



