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tained ; and this relation, due to special configuration, keeps off the 

 frosts in the fall, but, of course, not freezing weather, which stretches 

 everywhere when the sun is on the Tropic of Cancer. With regard 

 to storms, sea-breezes, and the deflection of winds by the Appalachian 

 Mountains, it ma}' be observed that hurricanes the designation of 

 those terrible tropical meteors do not reach these mountains, 

 because such storms, and all widely extended ones, are the product 

 of heat and moisture. They are born in the Antilles, are rotary in 

 character, and buried in the prevailing winds, follow their course 

 as the circular eddies do when an obstacle is placed in a stream. 

 Their path is where heat and great moisture exist; otherwise their 

 force is diminished, and the}' are dissipated. Those that strike our 

 Atlantic coasts and follow the Gulf Stream are fed by the moisture 

 and heat of that stream, and their greatest violence is on the ocean 

 and its shore-line. I was in the mountains of North Carolina when 

 the great cyclone of 1879 passed up the coast, destroying so much 

 property at Beaufort, Wilmington, Long Branch, &c. It was only 

 a gale in the mountains. Other meteors steer straight across the 

 Gulf of Mexico ; but their violence is expended in that inland sea, 

 and along its shores, Havana, Key West, Galveston, Mobile. When 

 the storm passes inland it expands, its violence immediately decreases, 

 and the whole valley of the Mississippi and the Appalachian Moun- 

 tains receive their needful rain." 



"The first observation one makes in these mountains is, that no 

 violent storms can exist there such as characterizes the White Moun- 

 tains, because, except on the very highest peaks, lofty and regular 

 trees and cultivation reach their summits. They do not deflect these 

 storms : they emasculate them by depriving 4;hem of moisture, and the 

 vortex of the meteor, where the greatest force is exerted, must seek 

 a- water-way for its course. The prevailing winds bring great storms 

 across our country from the Pacific ; but the}' lose their moisture in 

 crossing the mountains, and would be dissipated if it were not for the 

 great chain of lakes, the moisture from which rekindles their fury ; 

 and they exhibit it in all the cities near their path in their way to the 

 Atlantic, where they frequently meet a cyclone coming up the Gulf 

 Stream, and the friction of the two are those terrible storms which 

 one meets between here and England." 



"The cotton belt commencing in North Carolina, averaging two 

 hundred miles in width, excepting where it ascends the Mississippi 

 four hundred miles from its mouth, and terminating almost in a point 

 in Southern Texas, has an axis whose mean temperature is 64, with 

 extremes from 27 by 30 to 98 by 104." 



" I have already wearied you, and I should exhaust you if I wrote 

 you any more of my reflections after two years' travelling in this 

 wonderful belt. I will finish by observing only, that the warm water 

 of the Gulf of Mexico and the South Atlantic furnishes the moisture 

 required for the cotton plant, while they both act as conductors to 

 draw off the force of those cyclones which are let loose in the very 

 months when the plant, if in their track, would be utterly destroyed." 



