T. B. Butler

“ As twilight approaches they will fly away inland, forty or fifty miles perhaps, and settle among the lilies or grass which surround some fresh-water pond, certain of remaining while the storm lasts, and for one day at least, out of danger, and undisturbed. Many a time, in my boyhood, have I heard, in the stillness of evening, the whistling of their wings, as they swept up the Connecticut valley, to seek, on the borders of the coves, and in the creeks of the meadows, a concealed and safe feeding-place during a coming storm. ”

“ Many plain, unassuming men—farmers, shipmasters, and others within the circle of my acquaintance—know more, practically, of the weather than the most learned closet-theorist, or the most indefatigable recorder of its changes. Every one, by studying the page of nature above him, as he would the page of any other science, and testing, by observation, the numerous theories invented to account for the varied phenomena, may learn much, very much, that will be useful and interesting to him, and which he can never learn from books, or instruments, or theories alone. ”

“ Evaporation from the surface of any given portion of the earth outside of the tropics does not alone supply that portion with rain. Vast and wonderful, coextensive with the globe itself, and perfectly connected, is the machinery by which that supply is furnished even to the most inconsiderable portion of its surface.
Take your map of North America and note, in this respect, its peculiarities. It extends from the Isthmus of Darien to the Arctic regions, and from the 65th to the 160th meridian of west longitude from Greenwich, and has upon its surface a type of every climate in the world. ”

“ Now the barometer rises rapidly, the thermometer falls, and in an incredibly short time all is congealed, and cold and wintery as before. The cold N. W. wind has again interposed between the trade and the earth; the trade is elevated a mile or more above it and is entirely free from its influence and from condensation; the deep blue of a sky “as pure as the spirit that made it” is over us, and steady winter reigns again.
It is obvious that there was nothing in the action of the sun upon our snow-clad country, to induce the thaw or the storm. ”

“ Lightning flashes all around us; as the wind whirls from north-east to south-west, rain and snow-flakes become hail, half the size of peas. Thunder roars and echoes through the mountains; the mules hang their heads, and travel slowly; the thinly-clad aboriginal walks shivering as he drives the train ahead; the dark cumulus cloud seems to wrap itself around us. ”

“ Has the earth any agency, and if so, what? If neither the ceiling nor floor of the chamber have any agency in producing it, what does? Are we to consider the storm-scud as possessing the power, and as waltzing around the aerial chamber, carrying the air with them in a hurricane-dance of devastation? What, in short, is the power, and how is it exerted? ”

“ What produces the extra-tropical belt of regular rains surrounding the earth, north of the parallel of 30° north, in some places, and 35° in others, extending to the pole, with its southern edge traveling up ten or more degrees in summer, leaving large portions of the earth subject to a dry season; and back again in the winter to give them a rainy one? What produces the narrow belt of inter-tropical rains, encircling the earth; traveling up and down every year over an average of 35° of latitude, supplying every portion of it alternately with rain? ”

“ The hottest surfaces, even at the rainless portion, where there is no vortex, no storm, and no wind but the continual uniform N. E. horizontal trade-wind, never created, by reason of the heat alone, a mile of wind, a storm or shower.
But, again, the belt of calms, where the air is supposed to rise and create a suction which draws the trades on either side a distance of from one thousand to two thousand miles, an average of three thousand miles in all, at least, is not itself, on an average, over five hundred miles in breadth from north to south. What a wonder of meteorology is here! ”

“ The musk-rat builds, of long grass and weeds, his floating nest in the pond, that he may have a place to retire to, when the rain fills it up and drives him from his burrow in its banks.
But man, with all his intellect, is too heedless of the change. Additional clothing is now as necessary to him as to animals, but it is burdensome to him in the day time, and therefore he will not wear it, how much soever it would add to his comfort and safety during the night. ”

“ The advance cirrus condensation of the storm is over us and affecting us; the earth too is affecting the adjacent atmosphere by action extended from beneath the storm. Still there is no wind, although sounds seem to be heard a little more distinctly from the east, and so ends the day. Evening comes, and the moon wades in a smooth bank of cirro-stratus haze, with a very large circle around her; the cirrus bands of haze have coalesced and formed a thin stratus. ”

“ Nay, what heating process is it that disturbs the calms of the polar regions with fresh breezes and gales, sometimes of the force of 6, when the sun does not shine, the thermometer is from 20° to 40° below zero, the earth and sea one frozen surface, and the hardy explorer dressed in furs, barely lives in his cabin covered by an embankment of snow, and heated by a stove?
Gentlemen, meteorologists, it will not do. The theory is unsound; the assumed facts do not exist. ”

“ As in the icy north animals become torpid from cold, so here the crocodile and the boa-constrictor lie wrapped in unbroken sleep, deeply buried in the dried soil. Every where the drought announces death, yet every where the thirsty wanderer is deluded by the phantom of a moving, undulating, watery surface, created by the deceptive play of the reflected rays of light (the mirage) . A narrow stratum separates the ground from the distant palm-trees, which seem to hover aloft, owing to the contact of currents of air having different degrees of heat, and therefore of density. ”

“ The mild phosphorescence of the Magellanic clouds fades away. Even the vertical stars of the constellations Aquila and Ophiuchus, shine with a flickering and less planetary light. Like some distant mountain, a single cloud is seen rising perpendicularly on the southern horizon. Misty vapors collect and gradually overspread the heavens, while distant thunder proclaims the approach of the vivifying rain. Scarcely is the surface of the earth moistened, before the teeming steppe becomes covered with Killingiæ, with the many-panicled Paspalum, and a variety of grasses. ”

“ The latter appears first as rain at Fort Towson, on the nineteenth, moving north and curving to the east—its center passing near St. Louis, and south of Quebec, and the whole storm enlarging as it advanced.
Take another instance. Since the thaw it has not been quite as cold as before; but the rain-soaked snow is hard and solid, the ground, where the snow was blown or worn off, icy and slippery—the thermometer falls during the night to about 12°, and rises to about 30°; the sun makes no impression upon the snow; the firmament is of the deepest blue, the borealis at night vivid. ”

“ To a level and remarkably watered country, greater magnetic and electric intensity, and a greater volume of counter-trade, we are, and ever shall remain, indebted, for an almost exclusive monopoly in the growth of two of the most important staple productions of the earth. On the other hand, although the same magnetic intensity, and its winter excess of positive electricity and cold, make our winters extreme, there are but few of the productions of temperate latitudes which we can not grow successfully, and they are comparatively unimportant. ”

“ Does any man believe that either current exists? Why, then, do we not have our hats taken off, or light objects carried up, or have a monsoon, or, at least, have the clouds running up, when we have such elevated temperatures. Nothing of the kind occurs with us. Our hottest days are comparatively still days; and I have seen the cumulus sailing gently to the east, horizontally, when the air was at 98°. Why should we be exempt? Is not our air the same and our heat the same? ”

“ Far above the seeming clouds you notice, directly over your head when it rains or snows, are the rain or snow clouds, dense and dark, passing to the eastward, how strong soever the wind may blow from the quarter to which they tend, or any other quarter, between you and them. ”

“ It is well settled that atmospheric electricity can and does flow in currents with light, by experiments in relation to the brush discharge, etc. That it may do so without light or disruptive discharge, and in a stream, or as it is termed, by convection, with the force and effect seen in the tornado, is perfectly consistent with what we know of it—and it is, I think clearly evinced that such is the character of the phenomena, by the fact that a sudden powerful disruptive discharge, with light, up the spout, produces an instantaneous partial or total suspension of its action ”

“ Is not every vesicle a model shower, positively electrified on the outside, negatively in the center, or the reverse, according to the strata, with the air expanded in the middle by the excess of heat which negative electricity detains? Look at them, as they attach themselves to the slender nap of the cloth you wear, when passing through them, and see how many of them it would require to form a large drop of rain. The clouds are of a similar vesicular character, and rain does not fall till the vesicles unite to form drops. ”

“ The hypothesis is without foundation, and Professor’s Coffin’s perplexity and astonishment must remain, until he abandons the theory of rarefaction entirely. The winds which so perplex him are nothing but the regular N. E. trades, made to originate on the coast and continent of Africa, in summer, by the northern transit of the whole machinery. They not only draw off from the desert coast, but they blow over the desert itself on to the ocean, and into the rainy belt upon the land, as we have already seen, and the supposed vortex of rarefaction does not exist. ”

“ The agents which produce monsoons reside on the land. These winds are caused by the rarefaction of the air over large districts of country situated on the polar edge, or near the polar edge, of the trade-winds. Thus, the monsoons of the Indian Ocean are caused by the intense heat which the rays of a cloudless sun produce, during the summer time, upon the Desert of Cobi and the burning plains of Central Asia. When the sun is north of the equator, the force of his rays, beating down upon these wide and thirsty plains, is such as to cause the vast superincumbent body of air to expand and ascend. ”

“ In like manner the sea-breezes and other fair-weather surface winds, rise in the forenoon with the influence of the sun upon the magnetic currents and the needle, and die away at nightfall when the influence ceases. ”

“ No change of temperature is observed when fogs form, except the ordinary change between night and day; and it seems perfectly obvious, in looking at all the phenomena, that fogs form at a temperature of 70° or 75°, in consequence of the electric influence of the earth upon the adjoining surface-atmosphere; and, when formed, they withstand the most intense action of a summer sun, till the time of day arrives for the barometric and electric tension to fall, condensation to take place in the counter-trade above, and wind to be induced. ”