Writing of hurricanes awhile ago, reminds me of the pertinacity with which the great majority of the people in our Western States allude to their terrible tornadoes as cyclones. It would be reasonable to presume that the inhabitants of a district subject to any peculiar atmospheric disturbance would know and make use of the proper term for such a phenomenon, but it seems not. Hurricane and cyclone are synonymous, and are applied to circular storms having a diameter of from three hundred to one thousand miles, in which the wind seldom attains a velocity of over one hundred miles per hour, a pressure of about fifty pounds per square foot. They have also a progressive motion varying in speed from twenty-eight miles per hour in the United States to only eight or nine miles in the Bay of Bengal. Tornadoes are also gyratory storms that progress in a straight line at a mean speed of thirty miles an hour, but their path is almost infinitesimal compared with the cyclone’s, for it is generally between one thousand and six thousand feet in width and about forty miles long, each individual storm completely dissolving and vanishing like a thunder-squall in less than an hour. A cyclone may blow for days. In the fury of its rotary motion and upward suction a tornado is the most appalling of all natural phenomena save, perhaps, the earthquake, and the passing of one causes the most incredible and seemingly impossible freaks. Chickens are stripped of their feathers, straws are driven firmly into planks, and locomotives weighing fifty tons have been over-turned without effort, the latter being possible by the formation of a partial vacuum. Straws, however, have been driven an eighth of an inch into a plank by an artificial blast of air moving at the rate of one hundred and sixty miles per hour. The presence of a vacuum is proved by the violent bursting outward of the closed windows and shutters of a house in or near the track of a tornado.