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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
damage on the coast of Nova Scotia. It did not, however, 
travel as far as Europe, having disappeared in the neighbour- 
hood of Newfoundland. In fact, very few storms have really 
been proved to maintain their individuality during their transit. 
Professor Loomis, an American meteorologist, who has devoted 
much attention during the last 20 years to the connection be- 
tween European and American weather, has very recently pub- 
lished a paper on the results of discussion of two years’ daily 
synoptic charts of the Atlantic. During that interval 36 areas 
of depression were traceable across the Atlantic, that is, at the 
rate of 18 a year. Testing these by wind reports from England 
alone, he finds that the chance that a storm centre coming from 
the United States will strike England is only 1 in 9 ; of its 
causing a gale anywhere near the English coast it is 1 in 6 ; 
while the chance of its causing a strong breeze is an even one. 
This brings us to a subject which has attracted an immense 
amount of public attention in this country and in France : the 
practical value of the warnings which have been sent over by 
the “ New York Herald ” during the last two years. By “ prac- 
tical value ” I mean the value to our fishermen and coasting 
sailors, for whose benefit, more than for that of seagoing men 
in large vessels, the whole system of storm-warnings has been 
called into being. It is evident that a warning which is locally 
unfulfilled may mean a loss of some hundreds of pounds to a 
fishing fleet ; and although the storm to which it referred may 
have reached some parts of the coasts of Europe, yet if it did 
not visit the precise district where the fishing was being 
prosecuted at the time, the fishermen in that district were 
not benefited by the warning. On the contrary, they were the 
worse for having received it, on the old principle that “Wolf! 
Wolf!” should not be cried too often. 
Of course, every word that I here say as to the usefulness of 
warnings is just as true with reference to warnings issued by 
our own office in London as to those of the “ New York Herald,” 
but these latter are often very general in their scope. They 
speak occasionally of a storm reaching the British Isles and 
France, and affecting Norway. This haul of the net embraces 
25° of latitude, from 45° to 70°, and it is an unheard-of thing 
that a gale should prevail simultaneously over such an immense 
tract of coast, so that on each occasion the seamen in many 
harbours cannot derive immediate benefit from the publication 
of so vague an announcement. 
It is one thing for a scientific man to say that he can recog- 
nise the presence of the predicted cyclone on our coast — Pro- 
fessor Loomis admits that the chances are even that he should 
do so — but it is a totally different matter to prove that a gale 
which begins two days before, or two days after the time of a 
