Many people will remember the dire results of the famous St. Louis tornado of May, 1896, which resulted in the death of two hundred and twenty-five persons and the loss of twelve million dollars in property destroyed; yet there is no reason to suppose that this storm was an unusually severe one; it simply happened to pass over a more or less densely populated region. As usual, this tornado left behind some remarkable mementos, the strangest of all being that a piece of pine plank was driven by the wind head-on through the five-sixteenths inch web of an iron girder in the approach to the St. Louis bridge! This is a performance well known to the government Weather Bureau. Immense blocks of sandstone set in cement were dislodged and thrown down (in all, five hundred and eighty tons of it), together with two hundred and eighty tons of flooring and girders, some of the latter weighing thirteen thousand pounds each. In Lafayette Park, St. Louis, another example of tornadic vagaries was shown by the fact that, right in the path of the storm, surrounded closely by forest-trees which had been wrenched bodily from the earth, stood unharmed a flimsy, straw-thatched structure upon six light posts! Unfortunately, from the very violence of the wind, no accurate estimate of the velocity of the gyratory movement of a tornado can be made, as an anemometer would be useless, even if it were not destroyed. Experts calculate, however, that the speed of the wind approximates five hundred or six hundred miles per hour. At any rate, the destructive force of a tornado is ten or perhaps twenty times that of a cyclone; and if cyclones blew with the violence of tornadoes, the earth would be devastated in a short while.