At 60 trees are uprooted, chimneys may go, it is difficult to walk against, the noise becomes very great but rather inspires than frightens. As the gale increases from 60 to 80 (which velocity the Bureau rather weakly calls a storm wind), danger rapidly increases. Trees are prostrated, the uproar becomes terrifying, walking without aid is impossible, the great ocean liners are in danger, the sea becomes a whitened surface of driving spume that heaps up into piles of water thirty or more feet high, windows are blown in and frame houses cannot stand much greater velocities. Anything from 80 miles an hour up is well called a hurricane. Everything goes at 100. At Galveston the machine that registered the wind velocity blew away at 100. They have better instruments now, and in many places velocities of over a hundred miles an hour have been recorded. As high as 186 miles was registered on the top of Mt. Washington, and in a single gust 110 at Montreal. The great hurricane winds are most felt at a few of the exposed places on our coasts. Cape Mendocino, on the Pacific, has 144 miles an hour to its credit in a January hurricane. But enough destruction is done at 90 miles. Fields are stripped of their crops, or leveled; houses are demolished unless they are specially built, like the New York sky-scrapers, to withstand much higher velocities. In the small whirling storms called tornadoes the wind is estimated to reach a velocity of 200 to 500 miles, and nothing but the cyclone cellar will shelter one from the fury of the elements when they are really unleashed. The higher one goes the greater the velocity of the wind. On the top of Mt. Washington 100 miles is rather common for hours at a time and 150 is recorded now and then. That is only 6000 feet above Boston. If such a force struck Boston for a minute it would be blown _en masse_ into the Bay. Velocities on land are less than those at sea, because of the resulting friction from obstacles. Velocities in summer are lower (thunder gusts excepted) than in winter. Since the wind is caused by differences in atmospheric pressure, and that in turn by disparities in temperature, winter holds the palm for greater velocities because the wide whirl of a cyclone over the great plains may cause to mix air from Texas with a temperature of 60 degrees with air from Montana of 30 degrees below zero, while the summer temperatures in both states might easily be 80 degrees. Throughout most of our land certain winds have always the same bearing upon the weather and this correspondence is roughly the same over most of the country. West winds, for instance, are an almost universal guarantee of clear weather. The Pacific Coast and western Florida are the exceptions. Northwest winds bring clear skies and cool weather everywhere. In winter in the north plateau section heavy snows arrive in advance of the severe cold waves that come on these northwest gales.