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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



do not exceed, in intensity, the fiercest Atlantic hurricanes. The cyclone 

 or typhoon of the U. S. steamship Mississippi, October 6, 1854, with that 

 of the TJ. S. storeship Caprice, and the steamship Susquehanna, July 17 

 and 19, 1853, in Commodore Perry's Japan Expedition, are among the 

 most memorable storms of history on any sea, and illustrate the mag- 

 nitude and might of those atmospheric forces so characteristic of the 

 Great Ocean, whose meteorology is now to be brought under strictly 

 simultaneous surveillance and studied in its close causal connections 

 with that of our own country. 



As the investigation of the Pacific's meteorology is so important 

 to America, the same system of observations applied to the Atlantic 

 reaches to the roots of European meteorology. It is well known that 

 the atmospheric conditions which shape European weather and climate 

 are propagated over the French and British coasts from the Atlantic, 

 so that every intelligent storm-warner and weather-forecaster in Eu- 

 rope casts a wistful eye to the western waters to catch some premoni- 

 tion of what is to befall his coasts. Propositions to buoy in the mid- 

 Atlantic ships, equipped with self -registering barometers and weather- 

 indicators and connected by telegraphic cables with the shore, which 

 would flash reports of precursory changes to the central Signal-Office, 

 were suggested by General Myer to meet a deeply-felt need. It 

 has also been very seriously proposed to dispatch carrier-pigeons by 

 the westward-bound English steamships, to bear back weather-reports 

 from points two hundred or more miles at sea, in the hope that the 

 London office might have data for more timely weather-warnings. 

 " It is possible," says the Russian meteorologist Woeikof, " that in 

 October Atlantic storms may reach as far as Yakutsk'^'' (in northeast- 

 ern Siberia) which is farther from the Atlantic than England is from 

 the Pacific Ocean. " In Europe," Mr. Buchan tells us, " stormy weather 

 is accompanied by a diminution in the atmospheric pressure, the center 

 of which, after traversing more or less of the Atlantic, arrives on the 

 coast of Europe." One weather-report from the Atlantic, if only made 

 a few hundred miles from the British coast, would be worth, for all 

 practical purposes of storm-prediction, more than dozens of continental 

 reports. If, indeed, the international system does not supply the 

 needed ocean-reports in time for the European work of daily storm- 

 warning, its daily charts show the conditions which usher in the vari- 

 ous weather-changes upon the European coasts. They show, moreover, 

 the tracks which, at each season, Atlantic cyclones are wont to select 

 and pursue as they approach Europe, and the rates at which they trav- 

 erse these tracks. Given these mean data, deducible from the inter- 

 national weather-charts, and the chief elements are had for deciding 

 any special question of weather that arises in the daily work of fore- 

 casting. As a late writer says: " The most abstruse discussion of mete- 

 orological data have hardly another object than the determination of 

 the average conditions of the climate of ench place, and- of the amount 



