6go THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Unfortunately, we know very little about the rate at which these 

 storms advance, some of them moving at the extraordinary speed of 

 fifty or sixty miles an hour, as for instance that of March 12, 1877 ; 

 while others, like the West India hurricanes, do not attain one fourth 

 of that rapidity of translation. It is remarkable that the rate of prog- 

 ress bears no relation to the intensity of the storm, the slow-moving 

 tropical hurricanes being infinitely more violent than many of our 

 rapidly-moving disturbances ; although the storm already mentioned 

 in March, 1877, was severe enough, at least in the north of France, to 

 satisfy any requirements. 



As regards the distance which storms have been known to travel, I 

 may cite a very long-lived storm, which lasted nearly a fortnight in 

 August, 1873, and which was traced along its course by my friend 

 Captain Toynbee, by means of the logs of two hundred and sixty ships 

 which were in the Atlantic during its continuance. Its history will be 

 found in the last published work of the Meteorological Office, " The 

 Weather over the Atlantic Ocean during August, 1873." This par- 

 ticular storm wrought immense damage on the coast of Nova Scotia. 

 It did not, however, travel as far as Europe, having disappeared in the 

 neighborhood of Newfoundland. In fact, very few storms have really 

 been proved to maintain their individuality during their transit. Pro- 

 fessor Loomis, an American meteorologist, who has devoted much 

 attention during the last twenty years to the connection between 

 European and American weather, has very recently published a paper 

 on the results of discussion of two years' daily synoptic charts of the 

 Atlantic. During that interval thirty-six areas of depression were 

 traceable across the Atlantic, that is, at the rate of eighteen a year. 

 Testing these by wind reports from England alone, he finds that the 

 chance that a storm center coming from the United States will strike 

 England is only one in nine ; of its causing a gale anywhere near the 

 English coast it is one in six ; while the chance of its causing a strong 

 breeze is an even one. 



This brings us to a subject which has attracted an immense amount 

 of public attention in this country and in France : the practical value 

 of the warnings which have been sent over by the " New York Her- 

 ald " during the last two years. By " practical value " I mean the 

 value to our fishermen and coasting sailors, for whose benefit, more 

 than for that of seagoing men in large vessels, the whole system of 

 storm-warnings has been called into being. It is evident that a warn- 

 ing which is locally unfulfilled may mean a loss of some hundreds of 

 pounds to a fishing fleet ; and although the storm to which it referred 

 may have reached some parts of the coasts of Europe, yet if it did 

 not visit the precise district where the fishing was being prosecuted at 

 the time, the fishermen in that district were not benefited by the warn- 

 ing. On the contrary, they were the worse for having received it, on 

 the old principle that " Wolf ! wolf ! " should not be cried too often. 



