i 9 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The warbling woodland, the resounding shore, 

 The gloom of groves, the garniture of fields, 

 All that the genial ray of morning gilds, 

 And all that echoes to the song of even, 

 All that the mountain's sheltering bosom shields, 

 And all the dread magnificence of heaven 

 Oh! how canst thou renounce, and hope to be forgiven?" 



THE GREAT BENGAL CYCLONE OF 1876. 1 



By CAEL DAMBECK. 



~VT~0 more convincing proof could, perhaps, be given of the head- 

 -L\| long pace of our modern life, or of the thoughtlessness of our 

 age, than the fact that, though we still hear of the earthquake at Lis- 

 bon, hardly a word is said of the fearfully destructive cyclone which, 

 on the 31st of October, 1876, swept over the Delta of the Ganges. 

 Even in the queen's last speech from the throne, there is not so much 

 as a simple mention of that disastrous event, whereby a quarter of a 

 million of British subjects in India were destroyed. The after-effects 

 of the cyclone in themselves constituted a fearful calamity, for thou- 

 sands are still 2 dying of disease and hunger evils the seeds of which 

 had been sown in October. 



Cyclones usually occur toward the end of spring and in the fall 

 from April to June, and from September till November the periods 

 of the change of direction in the monsoons. By far the greater num- 

 ber of the cyclones occur at the cessation of the southwest and the 

 setting in of the northeast monsoons in the fall: out of eighty-eight 

 observed in the Indian Ocean, forty-nine occurred in the fall and only 

 twenty-nine in the spring. The former, almost without an exception, 

 came from a point lying somewhat to the north of latitude 15 north, 

 in the bay of Bengal ; while the latter had their rise in the neighbor- 

 hood of the Andaman Islands. The whole east coast of India is 

 exposed to the fury of these storms, and from Ceylon to Chittagong 

 there is hardly a point on the coast that has not more or less fre- 

 quently felt the power of the cyclones, though the localities which 

 suffer most are the low-lying portions of the coast, more particularly 

 when they are situated in a bight or in an angle, for wind and water 

 are there brought into violent conflict. One of the earliest cylones of 

 which authentic accounts are extant occurred in 1789, at an unusual 

 season of the year December. Furthermore, it was attended by 

 three enormous storm-waves, which flooded the coast at Coringa, 



1 Translated from the German, by J. Fitzgerald, A. M. 

 5 May, 1877, when this article was written. 



