One hot season which is now passing away has been one in which tempestuous alarms and excursions, from flying visits of typhoons and their debris, an ausuitable expression which recalls more substantial things such og the ruins of fortresses and of picnic parties, have been frequent. The excellent premonitions of Pere Dechevrous, and his admirable treatise on the manners and customs of typhoons lave somewhat over familiarized na with those unwelcome visitants, Before we knew so mach about them they wore surrounded with a certain degree of ignorant awe, Now, every one knows something, or at all events can easily say be knows about typhoons and the the law of storms. They are talked about with more or less flippancy over dinner tables. Ladies have been known to pause in the middlo of conversation about volleying, in order to pat gentlemen right who were not quite accurate in their definition of the phenomena of storms. Nothing could show more forcibly than this the interest we have all been led to take in typhoons by the Director of the Siccawei Observatory, and, por-Laps, also, by the frequency with which the most serious atmospherical dit turbances ba' issited us this year. Nothing very serious has bappoued; bat since the summer began we have been kept in a condition not a whit better than that of the "still vexed Bermooth A brief glance at the great storms of former times, and what some of them did, ought, therefore, to be interesting.
The first great storm that was care. fally observed and chronicled appea to have been that of 1703. Thousands upon thousands of fierce gales and devastating storms had swept over this globe before that year, but the gale of 1703 is the earliest of which we have complete and trustworthy records. The year bad been remarkable for the excessive humidity of the spring and summer months, particularly of May, when more rain had fallen than in a year since 1690. On the 25th November the wind began to rise: on the 26th its fury augmented. The storm swept over all England south of the Trout; in London it threw dow battlements and stacks of obi St. James's Palace, besides tearing trees to pieces. Que account says The number of undistinguished victims who lost their lives, at sea and on shore, during this tempest, has been computed at more than eight thousand. Three hundred sail were wrecked upon the coast; nine ies and barges destroyed on Rear-Admiral Beaumont, with the crews of several ships, perished on the Goodwin Sands; and the Light-hou at Eddystone, built by Winstanley, was swept away, along with its build that not a fragment was ever found again. One hundred churches were unroofed four hundred windmills and eight hundred houses blown down; a quarter of a million of forest and fruit-trees levelled with the earth; and fifteen hundred sheep and cattle drowned by the overflowing of the Severn, The whole nation was for a moment prostrated with terror: many fan thought the last day had come—they even imagined that they had heard the tramp of the archangel in the blast; and it was many a long year before people could speak of the Great Storm, or of Black Friday, without a shudder.
The storm of 1889 in which the Royal Charter was lost is considered to have equalled this gale in violence.
The West Indies and their seas are the birth-places and battlefields of tornadoes. Those which occurred in 1780 and 1831 are held to have been of peculiar violence and deatractiveness. At Barbadoes in the former year all the inhabitants were driven from their houses, nnd forced to seek such shelter as they could find in the fields during the night in which it raged; trees were uprooted and three thousand people perished. At St. Pierre, in Martinique, all the houses wore blown down. In 1831 the storm was preceded in St. Vincout's by the appoarance of a cloud in the northward of an olive green colour, and at badees it was ushered in by variable squalls of wind and raiv, followed by a dismal dark which gathered over everything, with the exception of an ominous circle of obscure light towards the ze1 In the midst of the storm a brief silence ocourred, daring which the wind fell to a distant roar the clouds cank so low as nearly to touch the houses, flaming streams of electricity poured downwards and wore returned in id succession from the earth, resembling the quick, irregular discharge of artillery closely engaged. When the storm was over at daybreak the whole face of the country was fouud to have been stripped of vegetation, except here and there small patches of n sickly green. It soamed as if fire had ron through the land. Some years later, daring another tornado in the West Indies, the captain of a ship reported having seen © most remark. able phenomenon to windward, It resembled a solid black wall, appeared and disappeared in an instant, reappeared, and finally spread itself as far fas the eye could seo, The captain described it as the most appalling sight ho had ever seen, and his acount of it was in a measure corroborated by the captain of another ship aniling at the time on the same seas. Among the ineidents—some, perhaps, requiring covfirmation—illustrating the force of those storms which are recorded, are three 24-pounders being blown away, and a piece of deal 37-inches long and Q-inches wide being driven through
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.