IS IT GOING TO RAIN? 81 



the bottom of a dam, a suction or whirling vortex is 

 developed that generally goes round in the same 

 direction. A morning-glory or a hop-vine or a 

 pole-bean winds around its support in the same 

 course, and cannot be made to wind in any other. 

 I am aware there are some perverse climbers among 

 the plants that persist in going around the pole 

 in the other direction. In the southern hemi- 

 sphere the cyclone revolves in the other direction, 

 or from left to right. How do they revolve at the 

 equator, then? They do not revolve at all. This 

 is the point of zero, and cyclones are never formed 

 nearer than the third parallel of latitude. Whether 

 hop-vines also refuse to wind about the pole there 

 I am unable to say. 



All our cyclones originate in the far Southwest 

 and travel northeast. Why did we wait for the 

 Weather Bureau to tell us this fact? Do not all 

 the filmy, hazy, cirrus and cirro-stratus clouds first 

 appear from the general direction of the sunset? 

 Who ever saw them pushing their opaque filaments 

 over the sky from the east or north? Yet do we 

 not have " northeasters " both winter and summer ? 

 True, but the storm does not come from that direc- 

 tion. In such a case we get that segment of the 

 cyclonic whirl. A northeaster in one place may be 

 an easter, a norther, or a souther in some other lo- 

 cality. See through those drifting, drenching clouds 

 that come hurrying out of the northeast, and there 

 are the boss-clouds above them, the great captains 

 themselves, moving serenely on in the opposite di- 

 rection. 



