Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/708

690 Unfortunately, we know very little about the rate at which these storms advance, some of them moving at the extraordinary speed of fifty or sixty miles an hour, as for instance that of March 12, 1877; while others, like the West India hurricanes, do not attain one fourth of that rapidity of translation. It is remarkable that the rate of progress bears no relation to the intensity of the storm, the slow-moving tropical hurricanes being infinitely more violent than many of our rapidly-moving disturbances; although the storm already mentioned in March, 1877, was severe enough, at least in the north of France, to satisfy any requirements.

As regards the distance which storms have been known to travel, I may cite a very long-lived storm, which lasted nearly a fortnight in August, 1873, and which was traced along its course by my friend Captain Toynbee, by means of the logs of two hundred and sixty ships which were in the Atlantic during its continuance. Its history will be found in the last published work of the Meteorological Office, "The Weather over the Atlantic Ocean during August, 1873." This particular storm wrought immense damage on the coast of Nova Scotia. It did not, however, travel as far as Europe, having disappeared in the neighborhood 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 twenty years to the connection between European and American weather, has very recently published a paper on the results of discussion of two years' daily synoptic charts of the Atlantic. During that interval thirty-six areas of depression were traceable across the Atlantic, that is, at the rate of eighteen a year. Testing these by wind reports from England alone, he finds that the chance that a storm center coming from the United States will strike England is only one in nine; of its causing a gale anywhere near the English coast it is one in six; 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 "practical 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.