WHAT IS THE MATTER?

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 9, 1877

WHAT IS THE MATTER?

Students of meteorology have had their attention strongly drawn to the extraordinary phenomena developed during the present season. It may be said to have begun with the great forest fires along the northern boundary of the United States, almost before the winter snows had melted; and fires unusual in number, and some very destructive, have marked the calendar, until it comes down to the sweeping conflagrations of St. John and Marblehead. These, like the great fires at Chicago and Boston, arose from beginnings that at an ordinary time would readily have been extinguished by the fire apparatus of the respective cities; but, as in those greater calamities, the flames seemed from the very first to have assumed an uncontrollable character. Respecting fires of this magnitude, it would seem that there is much to be learned, and it is not at all improbable that careful study of the atmosphere and electrical conditions under which they occurred may prove of great advantage in suggesting precautions against such occurrences in future, just as the Signal Service, by its storm signals, now enables navigators to take steps for protection from shipwreck.

In this connection the Philadelphia Ledger calls attention to the fact that about the time of the Chicago calamity there were most disastrous forest and prairie fires in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and that intelligent witnesses testified that in Wisconsin “hot blasts swept the country in advance of the fires; that luminous balls traversed the air in the afflicted districts; and that new flames started up at considerable distances from the main body of the conflagrations. There would seem to have been something in the air of that region, at that time, which gave it extraordinary potency to excite combustion, to feed fire, and carry it long distances.” The questions naturally arise, Are there any relations between these coincident circumstances; and, Does the atmosphere at times get into a condition to make it extremely susceptible to fire?

While great losses have in this season been sustained from fire, the total destruction by floods and storms has been scarcely less in the aggregate. Hurricanes began even in April, and Mount Carmel is but a marked sample of destruction from similar causes over a wide range of our country. The investigation of these phenomena comes directly within the scope of the Signal Service Bureau, and all that may be learned about them will be collected and digested by the best and most experienced meteorologists.

While these atmospheric convulsions have troubled our country, other parts of the earth have experienced an unusually severe earthquake with prodigious disturbance of the seas. We learn that new volcanic action has also been established in Colorado. And a curious fact in this connection we give on the authority of a gentleman who is a resident of the oil regions of Pennsylvania. He says that one of the great blowing wells there, which had been a long time discharging immense volumes of gas, stopped as suddenly and completely as if an ordinary gas light had been extinguished by turning off the gas by the stopcock, and has not since emitted even a smell of gas; and that subsequently, when the news of the South American earthquake was received, it was found that the shocks there and the stoppage of this well occurred at the same time, as precisely as could be ascertained.

These phenomena may all be mere coincidences. But it is not at all impossible that they may all have some dependence on the same operating cause, atmospheric, electrical, or astronomical. It is to be hoped that scientists will not cease their investigation until all is learned that can be in the premises, and it is made to appear if there were any relations existing between the occurrences of this extraordinary season.—Cleveland Leader.