DECEMBER, 1900. MONTHLY WEATHER REVIEW. 663
with ice, then, by means of a scale placed within the stem, the instru. ment can be used for measuring the pressure of the air. Experimenl shows that this barometer fulfils the three above-mentioned condi. tions.
The object to be attained by Dr. Fischer is one very much
desired by all, but as Professor Marvin has remarked, i t will
be so difficult to keep the water bath a t a constant tempera-
ture in a balloon, especially when the water freezes a t high
altitudes, that the above arrangement will be of little value
The uncertainties due to assuming a constant temperature
will always be greater than the errors of the aneroid barome-
ter and it seems more rational to labor to bring the pressure
boxes of the aneroid to a t least as great perfection as the tem-
perature boxes of the Bourdon thermometer.
The arrangement by Fischer would, we think, be inferioI
to a simple, straight tube, sealed a t the top and open below.
immersed in a bath of alcohol, glycerine, or other liquid, and
having one or two thermometers closely adjoining. The
length of the compressed air column, or rather its volume,
and the records of the two thermometers give us the meane
of allowing for the vapor tension of alcohol and the reduction
of the air volume to a standard temperature, whence the pres-
sure becomes known. But, of course, in order to attain an
accuracy of one one-hundredth inch of barometric pressure,
one must know the volume of air to within one three-thou-
sandth part, which implies knowing its temperature to within
one-sixth degree Fahrenheit. This seems a t first thought
easy, but when the balloon is rapidly rising or falling, the
expansion or compression of the air within the tube takes
place adiabatically, except in 80 far as heat may be conducted
through the glass tube, and this complicates the determina-
tion of the temperature.
LECTURES AND INSTRUCTION.
E. W. NcGann, Section Director, delivered a lecture on
August 22 before the Farmers Convention a t Janiesburg, N.
J., on the Weather Bureau and the State weather service and
what they are doing for the farmers. He continued the course
of lectures on this subject before the farmers institutes of
New Jersey during the autumn and winter, but owing to the
poor heating of the halls a t Vineland and Hammerston he
contracted a severe cold that temporarily incapacitated him
from lecturing; his lecture on December 19, a t Caldwell,
was very well received.
Under date of November 30, Prof. Wm. M. Fulton reports
his attendance a t farmers institutes, a t New Market, Clarks-
ville, and Fayetteville, Tenn. The entire middle portion of
the State was well represented a t these institutes and much
interest was manifested by the large audiences in the evening
as well as by questions during the sessions in the day time.
About two thousand farmers were present, and it is believed
that the value of the Weather Bureau to farming interests in
this State ie being greatly enhanced by the discussions at
these meetings.
The instit,utes held a t Memphis, Bell Buckle, and a t Nash-
ville during December were very well attended, nearly every
county in the State was represented.
Mr. David Cuthbertson, local forecast official a t Buffalo,
N. Y., lectured before the Mens Club of Lewiston, N. Y., on
Friday evening, December 14, and again Saturday morning
before the Union School of that city, on the work of the
Weather Bureau and its relations to the commercial and
marine interests.
Mr. 5. S. Bassler, local forecast official, Cincinnati, Ohio,
writes that the public schools of that city are now informed
by telephone of the forecasts of cold waves, high water, and
other meteorological matters, so that the information will
reach every home in the city through the children in addi-
tion to the usual methods of dissemination.
Mr. Bassler delivered the first lecture of the winter course
on December 14, for the Alumni Association of the Bellevue,
Ky., High School, on the study of meteorology in the public
schools.
Mr. J. Warren Smith delivered an address on the work of
the Itreather Bureau a t Lerado, Clermont County, Ohio.
The lecture was illustrated and apparently well received.
Rlr. Smith states that he is really unable to comply with all
the requests for lectures before the farmers institutes, but he
has no doubt that such work benefits the public.
On September 21 Mr. A. E. Hackett, Section Director at
Columbia, Mo., undertook the instruction of a class in meteor-
ology and climatology in the Missouri State University. The class will meet on Thursdays and Saturdays, one hour each
day. The instruction in meteorology will he elementary in
character and the work in climatology will be confined to a
study of the more important climatic features of the several
portions of the United States.
Mr. R. Q. Grant, Observer Weather Bureau, gave a lecture
on cyclones and weather forecasting in the Science Building
a t the State College, Lexington, Ky., Monday, December 10.
A large audience paid very close attention.
THE USE OF THE M. W. REVIEW BY TEACHERS.
We have with much interest noted the steady increase in
the circulation of the MONTHLY WEATHER REVIEW among the
teachers in high schools, academies, and colleges. We under- 3tand that this is largely due to the fact that all the newer
text-books on physical geography, physiography, and meteor-
dogy, and the journals devoted to those subjects make fre-
quent reference to and quotations from the REVIEW. In
Fact, Prof. Richard E. Dodge, a t the head of the department
of geography of the teachers college in Columbia University,
in a recent review of Wards Practical Exercises in Elemen-
tary Meteorology, emphasizes the fact that the MONTHLY
WEATHER REVIEW is an essential aid in good teaching. We take it that this mean6 that both the climatological data and
the excellent special contributions from our numerous cor-
respondents are highly appreciated by those who are develop-
ing a true system of education, based upou the study of nature
and not solely on the laugnnge and literature, the abstractions
md mythsof human invention. One can not acquire a broad
ducation except by going outside of books and studying with
mthusiasm the world as i t really is, not as man imagines
it. That education is most valuable which brings us into
dose contact with nature, animate and inanimate ; with living
men and women ; with the facts and laws of chemistry and
diysics.
AERIAL VOYAGES BY BALLOONS AND KITES.
The following interesting letter by A. Lawrence Rotch is
:opied from Science, December 14, Vol. XII, page 930:
The official report just received of the long-distance balloon race from Paris on October 9 changes somewhat the figures on page 799 of Science, Mhich were those furnished to the press. It appears now that Count le la Vaulr and a companion traveled 1.200 miles in 35 hours and 45 ninutes in the basket of a balloon containing only 57,000 cubic feet of
lluluinating gas. They reached n maximum height of 34 miles, :rossed Germany and landed in Russia, as did another of the con- ,estnnts. This is probably the longest continuous voyage in the air :ver made, althou h it was nearly equaled forty years ago by our :ountryman, John bise, who, with two companions, went by balloon
664 MONTHLY WEATHER REVIEW. DECEMBER, 1900
in 19 houra from St. Louia to Jeffemon County, New York, a distance of 1,160 miles. It ia evident that under the management of an aeronaut a balloon
can be ke t longer in the air than an unmanned balloon, but, never- theless, a l!hloon of 8,700 cubic feet capacity, carrying only self-record- ing instruments, which was liberated from Berlin in 1894, after attain- ing a hei ht of 10 miles, was carried 700 miles to the borders of Bosnia, at a Epee3 of 62 miles an hour. Still more remarkable, i n its way, was t h e flight of a air of kites last summer from the Royal Aeronautical Institute near %erlin. Five kites, which had lifted self-recording meteorolo ical instruments to a height of 24 miles, broke the wire that confined t f e m to the ground and the two upper kites dragged i t across t h e country for nearly 100 miles before they were finally checked t h e trailing wire? 2 miles in length, furnished sufficient resistance to keep the kites flying throughout the night.
TRANSATLANTIC WEATHER.
I n order to respond more completely to the needs of the
shipping interests of the North Atlantic, the Chief of the
Weather Bureau has entered into an arrangement with the
Meteorological Office a t London, Mr. W. N. Shaw, Secretary,
by virtue of which the Weather Bureau will receive daily
meteorological reports from London, Valencia, Blacksod
Point, Malin Head, Stornoway, Sumburgh Head, Paris,
Cuxhaven (Hamburg), Lisbon, and Ponta Delgada (Azores).
The European observations are taken at 7 or 8 a. m., Green-
wich mean time ; the observations a t the Azores are taken a t
9 a. m. It is expected that these records will all be received
at Washington, D. C., not later than noon, Greenwich time,
or 7 a. m., seventy-fifth meridian time or eastern standard,
and will be published daily in connection with the morning
map a t Washington. This will give steamers about to sail for
Europe the latest information as to the condition of affairs
on the European coast.
CORRELATION OF WEATHER IN DISTANT LOCALITIES.
Reports from Sydney, New South Wales, give accounts of
the most disastrous hurricane in the Island of New Britain
within the past twenty-five years. The storm lasted from
December 7 to 10 and came after an unusually trying season of
drought. The rain and squalls began on the 2d or 3d and
increased in force daily until the hurricane and tremendous
sea of the afternoon of the 7th. The center of this island
lies in latitude south 6O, latitude 150 east of Greenwich ; it
is therefore about 2 8 O due north of Sydney, Australia. The
typhoons or hurricanes of this region are usually moving
westward when they pass these islands, and as they circulate
in a direction opposite to those of the Northern Hemisphere,
they give New Britain heavy east winds when they pass to the
north of it, but west winds when they pass to the south of it.
The prevailing wind in the winter is north and west, being,
in fact, a portion of the northeast trade wind of the northern
trade region carried across the equator on its way toward and
around Australia. But these winds are feeble and interspersed
with many calms. Hurricanes are not nearly so frequent in this
region of calms as they are further southeast, in the neighbor-
hood of Caledonia, New Hebrides, Fiji, and Samoa, or to the
northwest, in the neighborhood of the Carolinee and Philli-
pines. It would not be surprising if the hurricane here re-
ported were a very slow-moving one, just beginning and grow-
ing in the region of calms, before starting off on its travels.
The daily press has been full of accounts of the typhoons
in the North Pacific Ocean, beginning with the destructive
etorms of November 13, at Guam, in which the U. 8. S.
Yosemite was lost, and continuing down to the end of Decem-
ber, with a series of gales and hurricanes on the route between
Japan and British Columbia.
The hurricane a t Hongkong on November 10 is mentioned
on page 558 of this number of the MONTHLY WEATHER REVIEW.
The southern portions of the North Atlantic and North
Pacific oceans seem to have been unusually free from cyclonic
disturbances. On the other hand, as the passage of storms
eastward is accompanied by southerly winds for a considerable
distance south and east of the advancing front, therefore, we
&re not surprised to learn that the 8andwich Islands have
been experiencing unusual southwest winds and rain. The
special correspondent of the San Francisco, Cal., Chronicle,
under date of November 20, at Honolulu, says:
The severest " kona" that has been experienced for years swept tbese islands last week. The " kona" is t h e native name for a storm from the southwest, a direction from which few storms come in this region. In reality, it is a cyclonic disturbance crossing the Pacific, and when its track lies far enough south, it appears here as a southwest wind. The " kona" of last week was one of the severest that has ever been known. Although there were no actual losses of vessels, the shipping suffered severely. * * * The wind was accompanied by terrific rains. The Oahu Railroad suffered two washouts and a landslide, which disarranged traffic for three clays. This issoniething that never occurred before. * * * On Kana, the flood came in such torrenb as to break down a protecting cement wall. * * it On Molokai the torrent came down i n such floods that a t one time it scooped out a course for itself many feet deep, carrying millions of cubic feet of earth, rock, and boulders in its onrush. On Maui the rain fell a t the rate of 4 inches a day for 3 days in succession. The telephone system of the island is in chaos. * * * The whole island of Haleakala seemed a rushing torrent and streams flowed in great volume where there were never known to be any before. Kahului was under water for several clays.
* * During the storm on Maui t h e Iao River overflowed its banks, carrying a raging torrent to the Rea.
The correspondent of the Washington Evening Star, Sereno
E. Bishop, under date of November 21, 1900, writes as f0110ws
froin Honolulu:
The exceptionally hot weather here ha8 been succeeded by unusually heavy rains during the past six weeks. The rain was deluging on the island of Maui ; being accompanied by a violent gale, there was some destruction of property. I t was more of a storm than has occurred in these parts for many years. You know that our group is absolutely exempt from anything like a hurricane or typhoon, just as we are wholly exempt from the extreme heats of the tropics or of Washington. It is a pleasure to note t h e practical success of the wireless telegraph between our islands * * * there seems to be 1 1 0 doubt that by February next we shall enjoy perfect telegraphic communication from Honolulu to Hilo across three sea channels.
Although a terrible storm passed over northern England
and southern Scotland, yet here, as in the Pacific Ocean, when
storm centers pass by far to the north, southern England ex-
periences the mildest winter weather. Thus, on December 26,
a despatch from London says :
England has one of the greenest Christmases on record, for the weather has been so mild that primroses ant1 corn flowers are abloom as far north as Liverpool and Yorkshire, while Devonshire revels in a
subtropical climate and the Isle of Wight is a garden of roses in mid- winter. Never have flowers been more abundant in the London mar- ket at Christnias time, nor has mistletoe been cheaper. * * * The London sky has been heavily clouded and the air filled with mist,
while the weather has been unseasonably warm.
Reports from Nome, Alaska, say that the worst storm of
the season as to high wind and heavy surf began October 31
and lasted uiitil after November 3, when the steamer 0rego.u
sailed. After the wind had blown from the southeast for
sixteen hours, during which time all the vessels in port put
to sea, it suddenly veered to the west and the thermometer
dropped nearly 30 ; the rain changed to snow and hail.
Advices from Dawson aud the Yukon Valley state that at