Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/394

386 cyclonic whirl developed on the periphery of the great North Atlantic anti-cyclone. It is a tropical intruder, the only general storm disturbance the tropical circulation gives us. It is no new type, but simply one of the two great eddies known to the general atmospheric circulation the world over. As it is a concentrated cyclone, the winds blow in and about its central vortex with a velocity that may easily reach 100 miles an hour, while velocities of sixty and seventy miles an hour are not uncommon at great distances—500 miles or so—from the center. It is the most violent tempest the newspapers are called upon to chronicle, but its characteristics are so invariable, its paths so well known—determined largely by the position of the North Atlantic anticyclone in relation to the continental anti-cyclones—that it is surprising to witness the confusion that marks news and editorial comment when one is at hand. Though every boy has seen a spinning top meandering over the pavement, most newspapers find it difficult to understand the slow forward progressive motion of the whole rotating cyclonic mass on its track. And yet Franklin, over 100 years ago, fathomed the secret of the apparent paradox that the storms that condition our northeast gales actually have their center to the southwest; and Redfield, in 1830-50, taught the American public all about these revolving storms of the Atlantic Ocean, while Piddington, a Briton, in 1848, in his 'Sailor's Horn Book,' made the broad facts plain to the simple-minded, unlearned, every-day navigator, and himself invented the technical term 'cyclone' specifically to describe the rotary storms, then believed to be peculiar to the tropical oceans. (Chart No. 4).

Hand in hand with misunderstanding and misapprehension of weather phenomena has gone the booming of the weather quack. In some ways this is the most discreditable feature of the newspaper treatment of the weather, since ignorance plus the quack represents a recrudescence of medievalism which would seem incredible, were it not a persistent factor in the 'popular 5 weather article that is given prominence by leading newspapers, while the waste of telegraphic tolls in sending broadcast the views of some pseudo-scientific zany, whose star for the moment is in the ascendant, is an extravagance which, if spent in the right direction, might save the news-gathering organization money and give it reputation. It is about time the newspapers learned that there are only two classes of weather quacks and wonder-mongers—those who are greater knaves than fools; those who are greater fools than knaves. . The whole business belongs to the slimy byways of astrology, or represents the fecklessness of those who peddle a quack nostrum composed of one per cent, bogus science to