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The unprecedented destruction of the tornado which passedthrough the western part of our county on the first of July last,created in the minds of many a desire to have a full account of themovement, conduct, and origin of the storm cloud, together with suchscientific explanation as would throw some light upon this remarkablephenomenon. After some weeks had elapsed, I gave the subjectconsiderable attention, and have prepared this pamphlet, which I trustwill meet some of the wants of intelligent inquirers upon thissubject, and will also be the means of enabling the people to have abetter knowledge of the loss sustained by those living along the routeof the storm. This account has been prepared at the suggestion of anumber who are interested in the subject.
West Chester, Aug. 15, 1877.
The Summer of 1877 has been remarkable in some localities for theseverity of its storms. These, in several instances, have partaken ofthe character of tornadoes. Mt. Carmel, in Illinois, was nearlydestroyed about the 20th of June last; Pensaukee, in Wisconsin, wasnearly ruined on the 8th of July, and Pittston, in Massachusetts,suffered terribly from a tornado on the same day. While these greatmoving storm-clouds occur occasionally in some of the Southern States,they generally move through sparsely settled districts, and the damageinflicted excites but little attention elsewhere. In the West Indies,and in other tropical regions, these tornadoes are of frequentoccurrence, and the damage is often fearful, whole towns beingcompletely swept away. In the East Indies, and on the coast of India,these storms are known as Cyclones, because of their rotarymotion—the Greek word Ruklos, from which "Cyclone" is derived,meaning "a whirl". A cyclone frequently extends across a great belt,and is from fifty to five hundred miles in width. It may last forhours, and if it occurs on the ocean it destroys most of the vesselswithin its reach. In the dreadful hurricane that fell upon Coringa, inIndia, in 1839, the town was destroyed and twenty thousand people losttheir lives.
Cyclones or hurricanes of this class, do not occur in our northernStates; tornadoes, however, do in rare instances. These extend inwidth not more than a few hundred yards, or even feet, and come and gowithin the space of one or two minutes. In power and violence,however, they are as destructive as the cyclones. In tornadoes thestorm-cloud, in nearly all instances, has a rotary motion; the windalso sweeping forward progressively at the rate of from five to twentymiles an hour. Science has shown that in the latitude where these rarevisitors come, they nearly always proceed[Pg 4] from south-west tonorth-east. In the great Illinois hurricane in May, 1855, that passedover Cook