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SCIENCE. 



[Vol. VII., No. 157 



raents which are apt to be misleading. He ascribes 

 it to a few isolated individuals and to sustenance- 

 seeking agitators. The facts are, that whole groups, 

 trades, have directly been affected wherever prison 

 labor has entered the market. The statement which 

 contractors are said to make, that convict labor at 

 fifty cents a day is not cheaper than free labor, is 

 not to be believed except upon the most positive evi- 

 dence, for the prisoners are driven and tortured to 

 daily perform a set task ; and that this is not an aver- 

 age half-day work is pretty safe to surmise. 



As to the selfish ' agitator,' he is the great bug-a- 

 boo of those who do not know him, or whose interests 

 are threatened by him. The truth is, that his is a 

 losing business : he is persecuted, blacklisted, hunted, 

 and misunderstood and denounced ; and that he 

 still remains true to what he deems his duty is a 

 trait that should be honored by all who can appre- 

 ciate an unselfish action. 



The real stand-point of the humane school and its 

 agitators is, that ' prison labor must go,' in so far as 

 it is directed to the production of wares for the 

 general market. The piece-price plan and similar 

 tub- to-the- whale measures will not stop this agitation. 

 The employment of prisoners towards their own sup- 

 port directly, as food-raising, prison-building, etc., 

 or their employment on public improvements, is the 

 only thing that will divert the rapidly increasing 

 political activity of workingmen as a class from this 

 'agitation.' E. Langerfeld. 



Your correspondent misses entirely the tenor of 

 the articles referred to. They were not written 

 from the sland-point of any school of political econ- 

 omy whatsoever, but from the stand-point of prac- 

 tical ethics. That convicts are to be subjected to 

 reformatory and ennobling influences is a truism 

 which my articles took for granted. That idleness 

 is an ennobling influence, that productive labor on 

 the part of convicts is of no injury to the community, 

 were the two points which I was concerned to es- 

 tablish. Dogmatic statements in regard to competi- 

 tion of convict with free labor cannot stand in the face 

 of the figures adduced in the second article {Science, 

 vii. p. 68), which were in every case official. Having 

 established the fact that convicts are best employed 

 in productive industries, it only remains to determine 

 from the facts, not theories, which of the systems is 

 the best. This is, I claim, the contract system, when 

 it is properly administered. The question of prison 

 labor is a large one, and, in the articles criticised 

 by your correspondent, but a small portion of it was 

 touched upon. Nicholas Murray Butler. 



A tornado brood in Hampshire county, Mass. 



The facts recently published, showing the wide dis- 

 tribution of tornadoes along the south-eastern border 

 of a stormy area of low barometer, and the further 

 evidence that they occur with special frequency but 

 at no fixed points in certain regions, throw no light 

 on observations made incidentally by me during a 

 residence at Amherst, Mass., from 1870 to nearly 1880. 

 I write this with the hope that persons in the central 

 and western parts of Hampshire county, Mass., will 

 for several years make and record observations of a 

 storm breeding-place to be now described, and note 

 the day and hour, so that the results can be compared 

 with a series of signal-service weather-maps. Some 

 immediate comparison can also be made by noting 



down at the time the newspaper signal-office report. 

 I have something to say, also, of the peculiar storm 

 or wind-gust that destroyed Northampton bridge in 

 1877. 



My house at Amherst, on ' Mount Pleasant,' com- 

 manded the Connecticut River valley for nearly the 

 entire width of Massachusetts. Directly west of me, 

 on a line with the foot of the steepest northern slope 

 of Mount Warner, but west of the river, was what I 

 may term a 4 cloud nursery ; ' not that I remember 

 it as conspicuously originating clouds in a fair sky, 

 but rather and very often as strengthening, enlar- 

 ging, darkening, any floating cumulus or cumulo- 

 stratus, and seemingly arresting and holding it there 

 until it became sometimes a rain-cloud, and, in three 

 or four instances, a tornado. It seemed to be over 

 or little beyond the hills west of Hatfield. My im- 

 pression was, that it must be somewhat beyond ; 

 namely, over the Mill River valley in the vicinity of 

 Williamsburg. The hills thereabout are not high, not 

 as high as others visible in the Green Mountain 

 range, beyond and to the north. My theory is, that 

 warm, moist, southerly winds all the way from Con- 

 necticut, through the wide valley of Southwick, West- 

 field, Southampton, were thrown upward in the nar- 

 rowing Mill River valley, which runs north north-west 

 from Northampton, and so moisture was condensed 

 in the upper air, the upward current at times inviting 

 toward it a tornado inrush of colder air. 



Certainly it was just there that two tornadoes by 

 day, and probably one in the evening, originated, 

 Sept. 4, 1873. The apparently stationary cloud had 

 been for some time increasing and darkening, when, 

 soon after noon, I noticed a portion of it hanging 

 down like the inverted crown of a low-crowned hat ; 

 and, not long after, the cloud seemed to begin a 

 movement towards the north-east, until, as it ap- 

 proached Whately, the increasing downward projec- 

 tion became ragged at the edges, and two opposite 

 motions of the wisps indicated a whirl. For a 

 moment an ascending funnel from the Connecticut 

 River, near Sunderland, met the descending one from 

 the cloud ; and, soon after, the now large and wild 

 whirl struck a shoulder of Mount Toby, levelling a 

 strip of forest, and doing much damage in the vil- 

 lage of Long Plain, bounded up the hills east of that, 

 and nothing more was seen or heard of it. The 

 second tornado, an hour later, starting from the 

 same centre, was less threatening in appearance, 

 passed over North Amherst, about seven miles south 

 of the first, and reached the earth only as a harmless 

 gust of wind. A third fell on Northampton at 8 p.m., 

 prostrating many of its grandest elms. There was a 

 fourth, somewhat destructive, at Granby, Mass., just 

 south of the Holyoke range, at 3 p.m , simultaneous 

 with the one that moved over North Amherst. This 

 one at Granby, originating at another point in Hamp- 

 shire county, and the fact that my pocket-diary notes 

 a storm and violent wind visible in the far north on 

 the following day, suggest some general conditions in 

 the atmosphere favorable to tornadoes, but do not 

 alter the fact that I saw ordinary clouds increase 

 on a day of seemingly ordinary weather, at the spot 

 mentioned, and convert themselves into tornadoes at 

 1 and \\ o'clock on the da} r named. 



That there may be another local centre south of 

 the Holyoke range, in the region of Granby, is prob- 

 able from the fact that in 1872, Aug. 16, there was 

 an isolated tornado at Wilbraham and Longmeadow. 

 My note-book, in this connection, only speaks of 



