“The city is not without a water supply, but it is in total darkness. The city street railroad has suspended business, much of its track being washed out. It will be a month before cars can be operated by electricity, but horse car service will be substituted at the earliest possible moment. The plant of the Galveston Gas Company is partially demolished, and is out of commission. Those who use gas for fuel are helpless. Fire wood was swept away, but there is plenty of drift wood to be had. “Several members of the police force were lost, and others lost their families. The force is greatly reduced in numbers, and at present is insufficient to meet the demand upon it.” The foregoing is a horrifying account, truthful and not over-drawn. In fact, the picture is far short of the reality. RESISTLESS POWER OF THE HURRICANE. It is a misnomer to call the violent revolving storm which devastated the city of Galveston and the adjacent coast of Texas a cyclone. It was in reality a hurricane, and more specifically what is known to meteorologists as a West Indian hurricane. A hurricane has a much smaller centre or diameter than a cyclone, travels with far greater rapidity, and its blasts often reach a velocity of 100 miles an hour. The hurricane of the West Indies, which is really born in the heated waters of the South Atlantic, and which as a rule curves when it reaches the Yucatan Channel and follows the course of the Gulf Stream, decreases in intensity as it travels further north, broadens in diameter, and becomes the cyclone of the North Atlantic. It is a curious feature of the Galveston hurricane that, like the great hurricane of September, 1889, which devastated Vera Cruz, it did not follow the course of the Gulf Stream, but curved westward instead of eastward, after passing the Yucatan Channel, and rushed in upon the Texan coast. Galveston was not up to this time considered as within the hurricane belt, and its awful visitation is proof that the laws of storms have exceptions to their rules. The late Padre Vines, of Havana, the venerable and learned Jesuit priest, who made a lifelong study of the birth and course of West Indian hurricanes, was accustomed to warn by cable the many friends that he had among the captains of the vessels plying to and from West Indian ports of the approach of hurricanes and their probable course.