§ 782. STORMS, HURRICANES, AND TYPHOONS. 415 



book, and scores down in column after column, and upon line aft- 

 er line, mark upon mark, lie at last finds that, under the month 

 and from the course upon which he is about to make an entry, 

 be has already made four marks or scores, thus ( 1 1 1 1 ). The one 

 that he has now to enter will make the fifth, and he " scores and 

 tallies," and so on until all the abstracts relating to that part of 

 the ocean upon which he is at work have been gone over, and his 

 materials exhausted. These "fives and tallies" are exhibited on 

 Plate V. Now, with this explanation, it will be seen that in the 

 district marked A (Plate V.) there have been examined the logs 

 of vessels that, giving the direction of the wind for every eight 

 hours, have altogether spent days enough to enable me to record 

 the calms and the prevailing direction of the winds for eight 

 hours, 2144 times: of these, 285 were for the month of Septem- 

 ber ; and of these 285 observations for September, the wind is re- 

 ported as prevailing for as much as eight hours at a time : from 

 K, 3 times; from N.KE., 1 ; KE., 2 ; E.KK, 1 ; E., 0; E.S.E., 

 1; S.E., 4; S.S.E., 2; S., 25; S.S.W., 45; S.W., 98; W.S.W., 

 24; W., 47; W.KW., 17; KW., 15; KKW., 1; Calms (the^ 

 little O's), 5 ; total, 285 for the month in this district. The num- 

 ber expressed in figures denotes the whole number of observation^; 

 of calms and winds together that are recorded for each month and 

 district. In C, the wind in May sets one third of the time from 

 west. But in A, which is between the same parallels, the favor- 

 ite quarter for the same month is from S. to S.W., the wind set- 

 ting one third of the time from that quarter, and only 10 out of 

 221 times from the west ; or, on the average, it "blows from the 

 west only 1^ day during the month of May. In B, notice the 

 great "sun swing" of the winds in September, indicating that the 

 change from summer to winter, in that region, is sudden and vio- 

 lent ; from winter to summer, gentle and gradual. In some dis- 

 tricts of the ocean, more than a thousand observations have been 

 discussed for a single month, whereas, with regard to others, not 

 a single record is to be found in any of the numerous log-books 

 at the National Observatory. 



782. The China seas are celebrated for their furious gales of 



Typhoons. wiud, kuown amoug seamen as typhoons and white 



squalls. These seas are included on the plate (YIII.) as within 



the region of the monsoons of the Indian Ocean. But the mon- 



