Besides the weather-making schemes already noted, mention should be made of certain more ambitious projects of this character that have been bruited from time to time, and that have found plenty of credulous supporters. In the year 1845 an American meteorologist of undoubted ability, but much inclined to the riding of hobbies--viz., James P. Espy--proposed the building of great fires in the western part of the United States in order to regulate the winds and rainfall to the eastward. The fires were to extend in a line of six or seven hundred miles from north to south, and were to be set off once a week throughout the summer. Another genius, of less celebrity, proposed to destroy blizzards by means of a line of coal stoves along the northern boundary of the country. A favorite idea of those who aspire to produce wholesale changes of climate is to alter the course of ocean currents for this purpose. One early plan contemplated the damming of the Strait of Belle Isle in order to improve the climate of New England and the Canadian provinces; while, a few years since, a proposal to build an immense jetty eastward from Newfoundland for the purpose of “protecting the warm north-flowing Gulf Stream from the onslaughts of the ice-cold, south-flowing Labrador Current” actually received, serious attention from the Congress of the United States. CHAPTER XXII ATMOSPHERIC BYWAYS 1. IGNIS FATUUS, OR WILL-O’-THE-WISP Will-o’-the-wisp is proverbially elusive. It has thus far escaped the fate of the rainbow, deplored by Keats. We do not know its woof and texture, and it is not given in the dull catalogue of common things. A strong argument in favor of the reality of this phenomenon is found in the great number of names that have been applied to it. There are forty or fifty in the British dialects alone. A myth generally carries its nomenclature with it, as it spreads from one community to another, while a fact of nature may give rise to a variety of local names.