214 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
Twenty-four hours later the center of the storm was at Lake Michigan, near 
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. According to laws heretofore referred to in these arti- 
cles, the area of low barometer starts in the United States in the West, at least 
there is where we at present first get track of it in its passage across our continent, 
and as it travels east trends more or less to the north. This area of low barome- 
ter of 18th of April, 1880, traveled in a line very nearly east-north-east. The first 
starting of the storm on the afternoon of the 18th of April, is reported to have 
been near Fort Smith, on the Arkansas river, in the western part of Arkansas, 
and that it moved in a northeasterly direction. ‘The next place of importance 
where it struck 1s reported to have been Marshfield, Missouri, while the storm, 
though with less force, also raged in and about Kansas City, Missouri. 
Now, if one will study the map, he or she will see that the course of. the 
storm was from the places and localities injured by the storm toward the path of 
the area of low barometer. Here is the simple and universal cause of allstorms of 
this nature—a cause and effect that any one of ordinary intelligence may readily 
understand if he will only heed the signs. If the intelligent will not heed the 
signs, why, then they will be as much in the dark as the ignorant, and if any- 
thing more so. And so it is not surprising that we see published in respectable 
papers such ideas as that there was a similarity between the storm in Kansas and 
one in the Island of Sicily, in the Mediterranean, two days afterward, and that 
therefore both were of meteoric origin. ‘‘The Kansas dust was composed of 
brown and black impalpable matter, and so abundant that on the next day traces 
of the deposits could be seen on the surface of the ground, and on a north porch 
sufficient to receive the imprints of a cat’s feet” *  * * The near coinci- 
dence of dates between the phenomenon in Sicily and here (Kansas), with an 
apparent similarity in the physical properties of the dust, might suggest a com- 
mon origin.” 
In the first place, I would like for the author of the above to publish to the 
world what a ‘‘meteoric” storm is; how it is to be distinguished from other 
storms; what are its peculiarities; what its general nature, and whether it is de- 
pendent upon the influence of the properties of high or low barometer, or quite 
independent of them. In the next place, if he knew any thing about the rapid- 
‘ity of storm centres, or the speed at which the areas of low barometer, which 
causes the storm, travels, he would have seen that it could not possibly pass 
over such a distance in two days, as from Kansas to Sicily, and more than this, 
that it is very doubtful about an area of low barometer which passes over Kansas 
traveling in such a direction as to pass over Sicily, or take any such like of lati- 
tude as Sicily in its course. 
The area of low barometer travels with greater or less speed, probably any- 
where‘from three hundred and fifty miles to even double this distance a day. The 
force or rapidity of the wind toward the center of the area of low barometer has 
nothing directly to do with the rapidity of the area of low barometer, but with 
its intensity. Relatively to the storm the area of /ow is stationary. Then as to’ 
