39 z THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



manual experiment could possibly make to appear. As one has hap- 

 pily said, " Nature makes no distinction between small and great ; the 

 drop of mist that lights gently down on a delicate flower, and the ava- 

 lanche that sweeps away a village, fall in obedience to one universal 

 law." 



It has been asserted lately that the Gulf Stream has no influence 

 upon storms ; that they have no tendency to run toward it or to run 

 upon it ; and that what geographers and seamen have always said about 

 the Gulf Stream as a " weathei'-breeder " and " storm-king " is absurd. 

 I think it can be demonstrated that this well-known popular belief is 

 not absurd. 



It is an observation, as old as Aristotle, that the storms of the mid- 

 dle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere advance from west to east. 

 This is obviously partly due to the fact that the winds on their eastern 

 sides are southerly, that they come from the equatorial regions, and 

 hence are highly charged with aqueous vapor. This vapor is absolutely 

 essential to the sustenance of the storm. Moreover, the law of storms 

 requires that the southerly winds should enter the storm-vortex on the 

 eastern side, and as this is the side on which the greatest quantity of 

 vapor is found, and the side of greatest condensation, of the greatest 

 evolution of latent heat, hence of the greatest aerial rarefaction and 

 barometric fall, to this side the heavier air from the west will push as 

 into a great hollow. Thus do we actually find that all storms, formed 

 west of the Gulf Stream, are actually propagated toward it. It may 

 be argued from the above facts that the anti-trade winds are thus 

 maintained by storms incessantly making the circuit of the globe 

 within the temperate zone. But in reality, instead of being the effect 

 of storm-influence, the anti-trades are originated by independent solar 

 agency, as are the trades, and they are potential and causal in produ- 

 cing the eastward progression of all cyclones. It must be conceded 

 that the pressure of vast aerial currents does serve to force the meteor 

 along with them as the river-eddy is carried down stream with the 

 water-current ; otherwise it is impossible to explain the westward pro- 

 gression of tropical hurricanes. While yet in the band of easterly 

 trade-winds the storm will invariably work its way or be propagated 

 toward the most humid region, unless mechanically borne in another 

 direction by the great atmospheric current in which it is often embed- 

 ded as an eddy in a river. The cyclone-tracks over all the oceans lie 

 in the central bands of the great ocean-currents of high temperature 

 and great evaporation, and the band of cyclonic violence is often 

 beautifully coterminous with the sharply-marked edge of the Gulf 

 Stream. Thus, in the Pacific, the Loochoo Islands lie just in the path 

 of the Kuro Siwo, the great Pacific Gulf Stream of the Japanese, and 

 are visited by the most fearful typhoons ; but the Bonin Islands, in the 

 same parellel, but on the extreme margin of the Kuro Siwo, have very 



