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here" is a clap of thunder.
The snowstorm offers a problem analogous to the dry fog. If the solution
of the callina of the Spaniards and the quobar of the Ethiopians be
possible, assuredly that solution will be achieved by attentive
observation of magnetic effluvium.
Without effluvium a crowd of circumstances would remain enigmatic.
Strictly speaking, the changes in the velocity of the wind, varying
from 3 feet per second to 220 feet, would supply a reason for the
variations of the waves rising from 3 inches in a calm sea to 36 feet in
a raging one. Strictly speaking, the horizontal direction of the winds,
even in a squall, enables us to understand how it is that a wave 30 feet
high can be 1,500 feet long. But why are the waves of the Pacific four
times higher near America than near Asia; that is to say, higher in the
East than in the West? Why is the contrary true of the Atlantic? Why,
under the Equator, are they highest in the middle of the sea? Wherefore
these deviations in the swell of the ocean? This is what magnetic
effluvium, combined with terrestrial rotation and sidereal attraction,
can alone explain.
Is not this mysterious complication needed to explain an oscillation of
the wind veering, for instance, by the west from south-east to
north-east, then suddenly returning in the same great curve from
north-east to south-east, so as to make in thirty-six hours a prodigious
circuit of 560 degrees? Such was the preface to the snowstorm of March
1
7, 1867.
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