Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 October 1875 — Wind and Rain. [ARTICLE]

Wind and Rain.

The regular and periodic winds and their effects are known to all. Although there are many strange circumstances attending their action, yet all are explicable on natural principles, by well-understood laws. The exceptional winds are those which attract most attention by their remarkable effects. Local winds are genetally most noticed for their singularity, since they affect but comparatively small districts of country at the same time. The Bora is a local wind which blows on the shores of the Adriatic and Black Seas. It is a very cold wind, and drives along with it showers of fine ice and snow, blinding to anyone exposed to its fury, and often doing the greatest damage to shipping, sometimes even to the extent of sinking the velsqls by the masses of ice clinging to their sides. The Harmattan is a healthy wind that blows on the coast of Guinea; it is hot, but very dry, and causes evaporation with singular rapidity. The skin of the hands and face becomes dry and hard, scales off, and sore spots are caused, which, however, are soon healed. The * extreme healthfulness of the wind is its

greatest recommendation. At the first breath every trace of fever disappears, and complete health is restored to all parts of the country. Livingstone describes a similar wind which blows over certain <lxn~ tricts in Southern Africa. This is- also dry, and so electric that the movements of!" a native in his skin cloak cause a succession of sparks. The “ Fon” is a hot wind which blows from the south over the mountain valleys of Switzerland, It comes in the spring, and, owing t& its high temperature, does more in a day to dissipate the winter’s snow and ice than would be accomplished by the ordinary heat of the sun in a week. In many valleys there would be no spring without the “Fon,” and in many plains without it there would be no harvest.

Of devastating tornadoes and hurricanes we have heard a good deal during the past few months, but the half has not been told of the injuries wrought by them. Riga was visited in 1872 by a terrific water-spout or tornado. People who were attending a funeral were struck by the tornado ; some of them were rolled along the ground like balls by the violence of the wind; others were instantly killed by the stones and slabs carried along by the storm. A striking peculiarity about tornadoes is the ease with which they bound over space without harming anything but the tops of the trees, then, descending, they strike the earth Ivith the mosft tremendous violence. A curious feature of these flying leaps is the circular hole often bored deep in the earth at the spot whete the tornado gave the ground a parting kick before jumping. Water-spouts, in spite of their forbidding appearance, are not dangerous. It is barely possible that some ships which have never been heard of were swamped and sunk by a bursting water-spout, but no authentic Instance of injury to vessels by a moving spout has ever been recorded. Homer says that water-spouts have a diameter of from two to 200 feet, and a height of from thirty to 1,500 feet, but land-spouts are often much larger, some even attaining the height of two miles. Accounts of destructive tornadoes have been so frequent of late that little interest can be attached to those of bygone days, and for that reason the further consideration of this part of the subject is unnecessary. Rain without clouds has been sometimes noticed. It commonly tails in tropical countries, and at or after the close of a very warm day. The cause is supposed to be the descent and gradual melting and aggregation of flakes of snow. Those countries which have rainy and dry seasons have advantage, but the discomforts more than counterbalance them, particularly as the moisture of the rainy season drives myriads of noxious reptiles and insects into the house, where their bites and stings often prove fatal to the inhabitants. As the annual amount of rain, of course, is the result of condensation of moisture, we find the greatest rainfalls take place in the torrid zone, where the evaporation is greatest. In the forest regions of South America the rainfall is often as much as 100 inches annually; and in Guadaloupe, in several years, the rainfall has amounted to 274 inches. It is very difficult to conceive of the violence of a tropical rain. It comes, not in drops, but in strings of water. Dampier says that, while on a visit to the sea-shore of New Granada: “ We made some chocolate, which we were obliged to drink standing. The rain was so strong that, however much chocolate we drank, our calebasses remained constantly half full, and some of us even swore that it was impossible to drink as much as it rained.” This fishy story is equaled only by one told very gravely by Prof. Maury: “ Old sea-faring men men?, tion such heavy and constant rains in the region of calms that they have scooped up fresh water from the surface of the sea.” The little incident would do well enough were it not for the well-known reputation “ old sea-faring men” enjoy of being the greatest liars on the green earth. As it? is, the truth of the story may well be doubted.

In distinction from these countries, where it may be said to rain always,there are some countries where it seldom or never rains. In the island of Margarita a few drops of rain occasionally fall in October, and never in any other month. On the Indus it rains, on an average, about once in three years; and the Canaiy Islands are little more fortunate. In Egypt it rains perhaps once in a lifetime, ana on the Sahara it has never been known to rain. Occasional heavy rains have repeatedly fallen in many localities. Perhaps the best authenticated of these heavy rains was one that fell at Genoa in 1822. In twenty-four hours a fall of thirty inches of rain took place, converting every branch into a roaring torrent, and causing great damage. Another example is given of a rain which fell on the Catskill Mountains, N. Y., in 1819, when in seven hoars there fell, by actual measurement, eighteen inches of water. The great English floods of 1872 are well remembered, as well as the ghastly sensation caused by the washing of hundreds of corpses from their cemetery bed and sending them drifting into the streets and lower stories of Manchester houses. All these floods, however, are but a trifle when compared with the violent outpouring sometimes seen from a water-spout. When one of these bursts the rainfall is not unfrequently from two to six inches in an hour, and, of course, when such a flood of water is emptied no ordinary means of egress are sufficient to carry it off, and the most violent effects are experienced.—“ The Aerial World," by S. Harting. —Connecticut is agitated over a reformschool teacher named Goodale, whose method of administering chastisement is in advance of the age. He always gently anaesthetizes hft patient by fracturing his skull /»and then pounds him as long as his ruler holds oat. The operation is consequently painless to the offender. Connecticut can stand a good deal, generally, but this one is too much. —They have a new zoological garden in Cincinnati, and one Oscar Nixdorf, an inmate of the Soldiers' Home, at Dayton, Ohio, knows it He visited there the other day and petted the grizzly bear until until he got his hantf chewed onj&wbile, and had hisjeft arm broken in two places. Amputationmas since been performed.