350 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



twisting of great trees as if by a monster corkscrew, the bursting 

 apart of houses on the vacuum side of the funnel and even the 

 drawing of corks from bottles. I have seen trees into which 

 were driven straws, so mighty is the impact of the wind. 



Now, what would happen if a Kansas " twister " should caper 

 across the North river and squarely hit New York city where it 

 lives highest? If one talks to the architects it will soon be 

 discovered that the fiercest wind ever forged in the caverns of 

 iEolus would retire rebuffed by the battlements of steel and 

 stone. But would it ? Prof. Abbe does not think so. 

 H. H. Hazen, once of the United States Signal Office, does 

 not believe the affair would pass off so lightly. Prof. Hazen is 

 an authority on the subject, and his study, The Tornado, is a 

 standard book of reference. Moreover, Hazen is an iconoclast 

 in his theories. He does not altogether subscribe to the 

 inferences made by Espy and others as to the nature of tornadic 

 storms. He even questions whether they always whirl counter 

 clockwise ; whether the column encloses a vacuum ; whether the 

 primal causes are entirely such as Espy believed them to be. 

 Finally, he points to the disposition of the debris as a dis- 

 concerting evidence that the whirl may not be always in one 

 direction. However, it may be conceded that there is an uprush 

 in the focus of the storm, and that its origin is electrical. The 

 thunderstorm and the tornado are first cousins in the kingdom 

 of our sky. There is an overwhelming generation of heat in the 

 cloud, which, as Abbe asserts without fear of contradiction, 

 represents " a display of force beside which 10,000 great steam- 

 engines shrink into insignificance." 



It is the possibilities of American towering buildings that 

 interest one. The higher the gale the greater the problem of 

 strain and resistance ; 70, 80, perhaps 100 miles an hour some 

 of the new structures might successfully encounter, but a 

 straight wind ? The tornado is not a straight wind, but a circular 

 one ; it twirls, it grinds, it bores and lashes whatever it touches. 

 It has several movements. It moves at the rate of from 30 to 80 

 miles an hour ; what the velocity of its whirl is no man may say, 

 though attempts have been made to compute it ; 1,000 miles an 

 hour is no doubt an over-estimate ; about 250 miles an hour is 

 nearer the truth. When the Wallingford tornado " blew off 

 monuments in a cemetery without chipping either the upper or 

 lower stone," it was calculated that a revolving wind of 260 



