Edward S. Ellis

“ Sometimes it will go through a forest leveling the trees as though a gang of axemen had plied their tools on lines laid out by surveyors, nothing outside the track being touched; but again in similar windfalls there will be found occasional pockets scored in the forest growth jutting off the right line, like small lagoons opening into a flowing stream. ”

“ I have seen one of the most violent and, so to speak, compressed of these storms, cut a road through thick woods so that at a distance the edges stood out clear and sharp against the sky as would those of a railway cutting through earth. ”

“ All navigators, when caught in a cyclone know how to get out of it. They have only to sail at right angles to the wind, when they will either pass beyond the outer rim of the circular sweep, or reach the center, where the ocean is calm. ”

“ Those terrifying outbursts which now and then cause so much destruction in our own country seem to be the concentration of the prodigious force of an immense ocean cyclone within a small space, which renders them resistless.
A writer in the N. Y. Herald gives some interesting facts regarding these scourges of the air. While the cyclone, as we have shown, may have a diameter of hundreds of miles, the track of a tornado is often limited to a few hundred feet, and rarely has the width of half a mile. ”

“ Many of the settlers in the tornado districts of Southern Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska excavate a deep cellar beneath their houses and cover it with heavy timbers as a place of refuge for their families when a tornado threatens to strike them. While these dugouts are usually effective, they are not always so. There have been instances where families having only time to descend and not time enough to close the trap door have been exposed to the storm's full fury by the tornado getting into the opening and lifting off the whole roof after having first swept away the house above. ”

“ The scooping action of the tornado sometimes makes considerable changes in the topography of the country, as when it gathers up the water of a large pond or water course and makes a new pond or opens a new channel. ”

“ Science as yet has not been able to grasp the laws that govern cyclones. They seem to be the result of some intensely electric condition of the elements, which finds an expression in that form. Cyclones, until within a few years, meant those circular tempests encountered in the Pacific and Indian oceans. They are the most destructive of all storms, being far more deadly than monsoons and tornadoes. ”

“ These disturbances are very marked in some cases, while in others they have not been noticed. In one tornado in Central Illinois electricity played very peculiar antics not only in the tornado's track, but also at some distance from it. In the ruined houses all the iron work was found to have been strongly magnetized, so that pokers, flatirons and other metal objects were found adhering to each other. Just off the tornado's track the same effects were noticed, and several persons experienced sharp electric shocks during the passage of the storm. ”

“ The force with which these objects strike is best seen when they fall outside of the tornado's path, since the work done by the missile is not then disturbed by the general destructive force of the storm. ”