shores, so in the Pacific Ocean is the cyclopean workshop of the atmosphere, in which are produced and whence are sent forth the meteors that perpetually travel over North America, and substantially mold its climate and weather. To cover the North Pacific, therefore, with a network of "floating observatories," contributing their "simultaneous weather-reports" to the Signal-Service Bureau, is one of the grand desiderata of American meteorology. A ship at sea is one of the best of stations for a simultaneous meteorological system. The value of its records is enhanced by the considerable change of the ship's location occurring once every hour; and the law of self-interest at least should compel every ship owner and shipmaster to enlist in a joint observational work which inures to his own safety and lends a helping hand to every meteorologist. Without the data, to be collected only by vessels sailing on the North Pacific, the prevision and prediction of storms and weather-changes that transpire in the Pacific and Western States, and are thence propagated to the East, can not be put upon a sure footing. With such marine simultaneous data, the work of weather-forecasting and storm-warning for the Pacific coast and the whole country will be greatly simplified, and the accuracy of the work much enhanced, if not assured. If the solar light of day comes first from the East, we may nevertheless predict that the flood of scientific light necessary to elucidate the still obscure phenomena of American, and especially Western meteorology, will break upon us from the Great Western Ocean. "The improvement" in the national tri-daily "Indications," etc., of the Signal-Service, which General Myer hopes for, as his oceanic simultaneous work "progresses," can not be doubted.
If anything more is needed to enforce this view of the immense value of North Pacific researches for the development of American weather-telegraphy, it is found in the fact that the cyclones of that ocean recurve from the Asiatic coast, and follow the warm current known as the "Kuro Siwo," or "Japan Current"—the congener of our Atlantic "Gulf Stream"—in its northeasterly extension to the northwestern coasts of the United States. This mighty "river in the sea" is a natural storm-channel. "The influence of the Kuro Siwo," says Captain Silas Bent, the original and careful investigator of its phenomena, "upon the climate of Japan and the west coast of North America is, as might be expected, as striking as that of the Gulf Stream on the coasts bordering the Atlantic." And Kerhallet, the well-known French hydrographer, tells us that it "crosses all the northern part of the Pacific Ocean, and makes itself felt on the northwest coast of America." "The track of typhoons in the China Sea," according to one of the highest nautical authorities, Labrosse, "lies between north-northwest and south-southwest, then toward the north, and afterward turns sharp around toward the east, in the direction of the Bashee Islands," whence in 1854 Mr. Redfield traced a number of them far away toward the American coast. These terrific rotatory gales rival, if they
