Even the dullest of newspaper readers must have observed something extraordinary in the atmosphere and other phenomena of this season. It has been marked by various destructive storms, and by an unusual number of disastrous conflagrations. Both series began very early in the season. There were forest fires in the East, North, and Northwest within a very short time after the evaporation of the last moisture from the melted snows of the winter months, and hurricanes began to set in as early as the third week in April. There has since been another, the most furious and extensive of all, ranging and raging over a stretch of country from the Missouri River to the Upper Ohio, some of the outflanking gusts reaching even to our own city. All these showed great electrical disturbance, and, taking them and the forest fires and the wide-spread destruction by fires in two cities, they furnish coincidences entitled to consideration. We cannot arrest or escape the tornado, but we can do something to reduce the risks of fire; and this latter is a thing to be done most carefully at a season when there seems to be an extraordinary susceptibility to fire in the air. When a conflagration consumes half a city in a few hours, and a day or two after that another sweeps away the more valuable half of another town, and when both disasters are the product of fires that under ordinary circumstances would have been confined to the buildings in which they originated, or, at the worst, to two or three others in the close vicinity,—surely such occurrences should arouse the suspicion that some extraordinary agency or influence is at work. Both the conflagration at St. John and that at Marblehead were uncontrollable from the first, just as the enormous destruction at Chicago was. The consuming element seemed to have, for the time, an augmented power far beyond the reach of the usual appliances. The fire leaped from street to street over spaces broad enough to afford ample protection at other times; it advanced like a great, irresistible wave as long as any consumable material was left in its path. These were characteristics of all the fearful conflagrations mentioned. It is not so generally. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the fires which reduced so much of the cities of Chicago, St. John, and Marblehead to ruin would have been extinguished before the second house was destroyed. But all the power of the fire departments of the cities named was of no more avail than if stricken by paralysis before the petty fires—petty at the time of their origin—which grew into such wide-sweeping calamities. These are, however, circumstances characteristic of them all. Not one of them at first seemed to be anything different from the usual fire that destroys a single dwelling, or workshop, or mill; yet each of them almost immediately got beyond control, and at each of them the fire leaped from street to street over broad spaces, and advanced until there was nothing more in its path to burn. Was there anything in the atmospheric conditions at times of these fires to give unusual potency to the consuming element? This is not asked as a question that can be answered, but as a question to suggest inquiry, in its relations to the extraordinary atmospheric disturbances which have marked this season, and which, to some extent, characterized the period at which the Chicago fire occurred. In this last-mentioned year, and near about the time of the Chicago calamity, there were most disastrous forest and prairie fires in Minnesota and Wisconsin; and intelligent persons in Wisconsin who were eye-witnesses to them, testified that hot blasts swept the country for miles in advance of the fire; 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 conflagration. Assuming these statements to be true, and they have not been questioned within our knowledge, 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 to carry it over long distances. What can our meteorologists, physicists, chemists, and other scientists tell us about this? Given these coincident circumstances, are there any relations between them? and does the atmosphere170at times get into a condition to make it extremely susceptible to fire, or to give it an unusual power to excite and feed combustion? If there be any such influences,—even if there be only a suspicion of them,—and if this season, with its long list of hurricanes, severe storms, and disastrous forest and city fires, be one of the seasons when such agencies may be potent in the air, then it is a season to be on guard against the beginnings of fires, whether by “accident” or by “spontaneous combustion,” or by the fire-cracker and rocket-stick. Those people are wise who do not tempt fate or undertake to defy the powers of nature.—Philadelphia Ledger.