“The night sets in on a world of snow, And the air grows sharp and chill, And the warning roar of a fearful blow Is heard on the distant hill. And the Norther! See! On the mountain peak, In his breath, how the old trees writhe and shriek! He shouts on the plains, Ho-ho! Ho-ho! He drives from his nostrils the blinding snow, And growls with a savage will.” The extreme ranges of temperature produced suddenly by high area or anti-cyclonic storms are the most dangerous features of the blizzard; while the only damage done by snow is to blind the person caught away from home, and cause him to lose his way. The past ten years have been marked by severe storms in our own winter season, the most terrible being that of January 11, 1888, when the wind blew from thirty to fifty miles an hour, and large numbers of persons in the west were frozen, and thousands of cattle perished. At Helena, Montana, the thermometer fell fifty degrees in four and one-half hours. The snow-laden wind reached a speed of forty miles an hour at Galveston, Texas. At Brownsville, Texas, the temperature fell forty degrees in eight hours. Two months later came an exceedingly heavy snow attended by high winds, in the eastern Middle States. This is popularly known as the “New York blizzard.” Snow drifted in many places ten or fifteen feet deep. “The fence was lost, and the wall of stone, The windows blocked, and the well-curb gone, The haystack had grown to a mountain lift, And the woodpile looked like a monstrous drift, As it lay by the farmer’s door.” The chief damage in all snow storms results from the temporary obstruction of roads and cessation of business. No very great destruction of human life has ever resulted, save in case of armies overtaken by the storm. Napoleon lost four hundred and fifty thousand men on his Russian expedition. Both armies suffered terribly in the recent Russo-Turkish war, as they lay facing each other at Shipka Pass. The constant accumulations of snow in the colder regions of the earth produce those immense rivers of ice known as glaciers, the fragments breaking from which as they enter the sea are known as icebergs. These, borne by currents to the southward, have no small influence in modifying the climate. In mountainous regions the accumulations of snow and ice produce snow-slides and avalanches; but owing to their entirely local character, the damage wrought by them is comparatively insignificant, not even approaching the lightning in the total.