Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/408

392 manual experiment could possibly make to appear. As one has happily said, "Nature makes no distinction between small and great; the drop of mist that lights gently down on a delicate flower, and the avalanche that sweeps away a village, fall in obedience to one universal law."

It has been asserted lately that the Gulf Stream has no influence upon storms; that they have no tendency to run toward it or to run upon it; and that what geographers and seamen have always said about the Gulf Stream as a "weather-breeder" and "storm-king" is absurd. I think it can be demonstrated that this well-known popular belief is not absurd.

It is an observation, as old as Aristotle, that the storms of the middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere advance from west to east. This is obviously partly due to the fact that the winds on their eastern sides are southerly, that they come from the equatorial regions, and hence are highly charged with aqueous vapor. This vapor is absolutely essential to the sustenance of the storm. Moreover, the law of storms requires that the southerly winds should enter the storm-vortex on the eastern side, and as this is the side on which the greatest quantity of vapor is found, and the side of greatest condensation, of the greatest evolution of latent heat, hence of the greatest aërial rarefaction and barometric fall, to this side the heavier air from the west will push as into a great hollow. Thus do we actually find that all storms, formed west of the Gulf Stream, are actually propagated toward it. It may be argued from the above facts that the anti-trade winds are thus maintained by storms incessantly making the circuit of the globe within the temperate zone. But in reality, instead of being the effect of storm-influence, the anti-trades are originated by independent solar agency, as are the trades, and they are potential and causal in producing the eastward progression of all cyclones. It must be conceded that the pressure of vast aërial currents does serve to force the meteor along with them as the river-eddy is carried down stream with the water-current; otherwise it is impossible to explain the westward progression of tropical hurricanes. While yet in the band of easterly trade-winds the storm will invariably work its way or be propagated toward the most humid region, unless mechanically borne in another direction by the great atmospheric current in which it is often embedded as an eddy in a river. The cyclone-tracks over all the oceans lie in the central bands of the great ocean-currents of high temperature and great evaporation, and the band of cyclonic violence is often beautifully coterminous with the sharply-marked edge of the Gulf Stream. Thus, in the Pacific, the Loochoo Islands lie just in the path of the Kuro Siwo, the great Pacific Gulf Stream of the Japanese, and are visited by the most fearful typhoons; but the Bonin Islands, in the same parallel, but on the extreme margin of the Kuro Siwo, have very