Littell's Living Age/Volume 129/Issue 1662/The Hurricanes
From The Spectator of March 18.
THE HURRICANES.
From Sunday morning to Wednesday night, the north-west corner of Europe was in so much tumult of all kinds from the vagaries of the gases, liquids, and powdered solids which make up the envelope of our little planet, that only an earthquake, when the very foundations of things begin to tumble and collapse, could have created more alarm. No doubt an atmosphere is a most essential provision for human existence, and planets like the moon, which have none, are very desolate wastes indeed; but the vivacity which an atmosphere no doubt produces seems to be rather in excess of what is suitable to such creatures as we are, when rivers, in one place, are heaped up into water-spouts "to the height of a house,"—as the Rhine is stated to have been at Coblenz; when omnibus-drivers are beheaded by a wandering telegraph-wire in another; when, in a third place, farmers are entangled and starved to death in that fine white powder which is the only solid held by the atmosphere in reserve against human enterprise; when roofs of churches are swept into the windows of the neighbouring houses, and great blocks of stone are driven from the cliffs like so many hailstones, in other quarters; and when in some European capitals there is a hat and wig and chignon and umbrella storm quite as severe and much more grotesque than the rain and hailstorms with which it is mixed up; most of all, when in the great cities planted on the banks of rivers large suburbs are suddenly turned into lakes, and houses fall like children's playthings beneath the swirling tide. The snowstorm of Sunday and the tornado which lasted in fits till Wednesday morning were real lessons in what the apparently very modest agencies of our atmosphere could do, if by any chance the force which drove them about were permitted to be for any length of time animated by a mad and frantic spirit of destruction. We are told now on all hands that invisible agencies of great physical capacity can be exerted through persons called "mediums," agencies quite equal to driving heavy furniture about rooms, and sending ponderous gentlemen and musical boxes sailing away under the ceiling. Well, suppose a band' of these remakable agencies, which seem to take so much delight in what is called "materialization," should get hold of the atmosphere for a few weeks at a time, and make it perform the mad tricks which tables and chairs are asserted to perform by the "Spiritualists." Macbeth's witches evidently had some such notion in their heads, and boasted that the object of their spite should be tempest-tossed, though his ship could not be utterly destroyed. And it does seem as if it might be easier for spirits to raise the wind, and let the wind thus raised float the heavy objects which they now exert themselves so much to drive about the rooms in which seances are held, than to make these great mechanical efforts directly, themselves. At a superficial guess, at all events, pneumatic exercitations would seem to be more in a spirit's way than the habit of discharging heavy projectiles. They always used to be called the "powers of the air," and there can be no doubt but that, if they want to do mischief, the air is a very wide sphere of influence for them.
So far from its being a marvel that we now and then have these tremendous disturbances in the atmosphere, the marvel ought to be that, considering the perfect fluidity of the transparent and invisible medium which is wrapped round the earth, its great mobility under even slight changes of temperature, and the awful force with which now and again it does sweep over us, we so seldom hear of the sort of confusion which appeared to reign everywhere between Sunday and Wednesday. Why should it be so seldom heard of that every yard within a walk of two miles should be strewn with tiles, chimneypots, brickbats, or some other vestige of the propelling power of the wind, as happened on Sunday, for instance, at Boulogne? Why should not the whole area of our island be oftener in the condition of that appositely named Estaminet des Vents which the hurricane suddenly turned inside out on Sunday in the same town? We suppose that the real guarantee I against constant repetitions of such scenes of destruction is the enormous elasticity of the particles of the atmosphere,—which causes them to spring asunder in so many directions, on the slightest of impulses, that it is far more difficult to hold the force exerted to pusFfing in a single direction than it is in the case of either liquids or solids. These terribly destructive storms are only possible, we suppose, when the forces which act upon the air are so combined as to condense a considerable volume of air and drive it steadily in a given direction, just as the compressed air which causes the explosion of an air-gun is kept by the barrel in which it is enclosed from expanding in any direction but one. Now, of course, this seldom happens in the case of an atmosphere which is only tied by the force of gravity to our planet. It is very rare, we suppose, under such conditions, for the constraint to be so exerted as to overcome the elastic tendency of the particles of air to spring apart, whereby they lose the continuity and coherence requisite for a combined attack on the rickettiness of human structures. It is the high volatility of the air which is our best security against the fixity needful for frequent discharges of such artillery as those of the early part of this week. A force which, if exerted to drive a stone or a bullet, would kill at once, and which, even if it were employed to drive water, would prove a most formidable power, is almost thrown away in the air, whose particles reflect it so instantaneously in all sorts of directions, that only a rapidly diminishing driving power is usually transmitted in the direction of the force impressed. Air is too much adapted for dancing away towards all quarters of the compass to be well fitted, without artificial manipulation, for the purposes of a battering-ram or a Bramah press. Indeed, it is in the gullies and narrow valleys, where something of this artificial constraint is provided for the air-currents, that, when such currents do happen to sweep through them, they are most terrible in the ruin which they bring.
It is, of course, chiefly the physical mischief caused by these tempests which arrests the attention of men. When there is a cloud of hats and chignons in the air, people do not think very much of the state of their brains or nerves, and yet the changes in the pressure of the atmosphere probably do cause more discomfort to most of us through our brains, than they cause even through the rape of our hats, or the wettings due to driving snow or rain. Whenever the barometer sinks very low, heads begin to ache, and sleep to forsake all the considerable class of people whose nerves require the stimulus of a high pressure to discharge their functions with their usual rapidity and punctuality. There are people who can hardly sleep at all at a height of five or six thousand feet, and though, of course, no fall of the barometer, even in a hurricane, approaches in any degree to the fall which is due to this elevation, there appears to be something in the irregularity of the pressure, when a gale sweeps at the rate of sixty miles an hour over the earth, and the mercury stands one day at only 28 or 27 1-2 inches in the tube of the weather-glass and at 30° the next, that more than compensates for the mere diminution of the weight of air which you get in high Alpine situations. Now that we know that the mere presence, possibly the mere pressure, of light will so far alter the constitution of a substance like selenium as to turn it from a very poor conductor of electricity into a very decent one, we need not be surprised to find that sudden changes in the conditions of atmospheric pressure often lead to changes in the physical constitution of the nerves that are accompanied by both great distress and great loss of power. But so much the more we have reason to be very thankful that these great disturbances in all the conditions of life do not effect the physique of the brain even more than they actually do. Very slight forces seem to have so great an influence on the molecular structure of certain substances, that it is wonderful our nerves should not be more liable than they are to cerebral storms and hurricanes,—to disturbances, for instance, which might make whole populations temporarily delirous, and turn a city into a big lunatic asylum, instead of a merely harried, and worried, and wetted population. Indeed, when we think of the wonderful volatility of the atmospheric shell in which we live, it is certainly much more surprising that we do not suffer oftener and worse from its high and low tides, its tempests and its stagnations, than that we are now and then forced into grumbling at the excesses from which we are generally so free.