simply great whirls or eddies in the lower stratum of the atmosphere, probably not more than five miles in thickness.

Tornadoes are the most violent storms we have. They have a diameter of from 500 to 1,000 yards and rotate with inconceivable rapidity. They usually occur in the southeast quarter of a cyclone area, in the afteror evening, between March 15 and June 15, and are more frequent in the central valleys of the United States.

noon

Hurricanes arise in the West Indies, move northwestward to the Gulf coast of the United States, then turn northeasterly toward the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They have a diameter of from 200 to 500 miles, being much smaller than the average cyclonic storm, but they are much more violent and destructive.

During droughts the low pressure areas develop in the north, and the drought is broken when the "lows" begin to develop in the south. Sometimes in summer there comes a stagnation of the easterly drift of atmospheric phenomena. Then if there is a high pressure area in the southeast and a low pressure area in the northwest the warm air moving northward casues a hot wave that sometimes becomes very oppressive. We know but little about the causes that lead to the development of these different storms. We simply know something about the phenomena that attend their progress across our country. And amid the most common phenomena unexplained exceptions continually occur. With all our delicate instruments, with all our opportunities for study, with all that we really know about weather phenomena, we have advanced but little beyond the empirical stage in weather forecasting.

The trained forecaster, with a panoramic view of the weather changes for the whole country before him can follow weather phenomena much as a train dispatcher follows his trains, and is able to foretell weather changes one or two days in advance with considerable accuracy. No local observer, whether depending upon natural phenom

ena or instrumental readings, could do nearly as well.

Professor Willis L. Moore, chief of the weather bureau, thinks it impossible, at the present time, to make a forecast of the weather, on scientific principles, for a greater period than two or three days.

The progress made in the study of weather phenomena has increased rather than diminished faith in the natural indications of changes in the weather. Realizing their value, the government has made a collection of weather proverbs from all parts of the world. There are many hundreds of them. Some are scientific and trustworthy. Some others seem trustworthy but are not easily explained. Many are contradictory, some are local, but most of the better ones are universal; many oft repeated are not verified by careful observations; others seem fanciful or foolish, but all are interesting and worthy of study.

Careful observations of winds, clouds, halos, and other natural phenomena will enable one to foretell local weather changes as accurately as the man who depends entirely upon instrumental observations.

WEATHER SIGNS

"The sun is bright, the sky is clear,
But grandma says a storm is near;
And when I asked how she could know,
She said the peacock told her so,
When, perching on the old fence rail,
He screamed so loud and dropped his tail;
And the shy cuckoo on the wing
Repeated over the same thing;

And "More wet!" all the Bob Whites cried,
That in the grassy meadows hide;
The soot that from the chimney fell,
Came down, it seems, this news to tell;
The kettle sang the self-same tune
When it boiled dry so very soon;
The grass, this morning, said so, too,
That hung without a drop of dew;
And the blue swallows, flying low
Across the river, to and fro.
So all these told her very plain

That ere the evening it would rain;

But who told them, and when, and how?
That's what I want to find out now."

[A second paper on this subject will appear in the August issue. Paper

Four things a man must learn to do
If he would make his record true.
To think without confusion, clearly,

To love his fellow man, sincerely;
To act from honest motives, clearly;
To trust his God, and heaven, sincerely.
-Henry Van Dyke.

EVERYONE interested in educational

work is already convinced of the potent influence of demoralizing publications; it is consequently unnecessary for me in a series of platitudes to repeat the traditions of the church and school, and all moral agencies, unless this repetition, or this possible redressing of old thoughts bring to you directly or indirectly a realization of the teacher's personal duty--an earnest desire to do quietly and unobtrusively a little work that will aid in driving out bad books with good books.

This work, like all humanitarian efforts, is most effective with children during the early formative period of their lives. Proper direction here is a safeguard against the development of a vicious taste.

"But what is proper direction?" inquires an anxious mother. For an answer, let me plead on behalf of the child for those old fairy stories-Red Riding Hood, Babes in the Woods, Bluebeard, Jack and the Bean Stalk, Beauty and the Beast-all of "Hans Andersen" and "Mother Goose." In entering this plea I am well aware that I am opposing some excellent, over-cautious, hypercritical mothers and fathers whose tender solicitude has made them look askance upon all this sort of juvenile fiction. Red Riding Hood and Bluebeard are rejected because of their gore and bloodthirstiness, and The Babes in the Woods because of its dreadful melancholy. Does the over-cautious parent believe he can keep his innocent child from harm by keeping him in ignorance of the world's cruelty? Long before this parent suspects it, his child has learned from his nurse or his little companions something of the evil about him, and most likely it is evil in its attractive form. Now the evil in fairy stories is always presented as a thing to be shunned. Childish sympathy has never been known to go out toward the cruel uncle, but it has wept many tears over the little orphans clasped in each other's loving arms, thinly sheltered by the forest's leaves.

Recall for a moment your own childhood. Do you regret that you learned these stories? Did they make you cold-hearted and bloodthirsty in your desires? What was the effect upon the youthful mind of Sir Walter Scott of those old border stories of "Thomas

Does

the Rymer," the "Hardens and the Black Witches" of "Lock Awe" that his grandmother told him in his childhood? the story of Old Mortality, of The Heart of Midlothian, of Ivanhoe reflect the sentiment of a heart hardened in youth and made. cruel and bloodthirsty in manhood? Did they make you feel that way when you read them? Rather your heart warmed toward those old heroes as they battled bravely for their honor, and their homes, and the principles they felt were right; and you rejoiced when Nemesis fell upon the villains whose cruelty and cupidity had inspired the struggle.

But aside from the mere moral lesson of the fairy stories, there is an intellectual consideration. The mind of the child is imaginative, and the growth of the imagination should be fostered and not dwarfed. These old stories are an inheritance from the race when it was young; when its joys, its sorrows, its emotions and its longings corresponded in part to childish nature as we find it to-day. Nourished with these, the imagination will expand and there will be a correspendent growth of the emotional nature, more virile, more healthily_masculine, more admirable in every way than our modern but less natural invention.

When the child develops into the youth, the need of careful selection in reading material is even more obligatory upon the part of the parent, because one must then contend with the influence of young companions fresh from the reading of Dare Devil Dick and Pretty Nell's Elopment. Now, our healthy youth is going to read something at this period, and it is not going to be Baxter's Saint's Rest or Taylor's Holy Living and Dying either at his own or anybody else's suggestions. It is going to be romance; but with tact and wisdom, he can be made to choose healthy romance. Our Penny Dreadfuls are hurtful at this period because the hero's aim is silly or criminal, and he is never deterred for conscience' sake from the accomplishment of that aim. The young reader habitually following these false heroes naturally gets wrong ideas of life. tastes are low, his ambitions wrongly directed, his whole youth warped by his chase after mere empty chimeras.

His

Again for this period of development I plead for romance-or for the historical stories full of the romantic elements. But it must be the sort of romance that inspires the youth with higher ideals of living-the sort that sent Arthur's knights on their search for the Holy Grail and made Sir Galahad successful; that sent the Grecians into Troy to reclaim their stolen Helen; that sort of romance which inspires love for honor, homes, virtue and God, and fills men "with the stuff that heroes are made of."

All of you who are teachers are interested in the selection of reading matter for young children and youths for unselfish reasons. You want to do what you can to help them, and you study their natures and you try to find the sort of material that is best suited for them-the sort that will inspire them toward higher ideals of living. That task finished, you have an opportunity to choose for yourself. Of course you will read Shakes. peare, and Milton, and Wordsworth and Tennyson, and Browning, and notwithstanding the traditions of some fathers you will read fiction-a good deal, perhaps. We now take it for granted that novel reading is beneficial. We have read "Dickens," and "Thackeray," and "Scott" and "George Eliot," and we have seen recorded in their pages the joys, the sorrows, the doubts, the struggles, the disappointments, the successes which we have seen partially or wholly paralleled in our own or our friends' experiences; and our sympathies have been broadened, and our understandings widened, and our charity for human frailty has increased. When personal temptations have come to us, we have remembered, along with the moral lessons taught under the guardianship of the church, the terrible anguish which a Steerforth has entailed, or a Hester Prynne has suffered. The life of Fagin the Jew and Pere Grandet has warned us from the path of cupidity, and the moral virility of Adam Bede has taught us loyalty to truth as we have seen it revealed.

Lately, however, there has come into popularity a class of novels which, it seems to me, deserves unqualified rebuke. When a writer like Grant Allen makes a traversty of the marriage relation, robs it of its sacred purity and holds up to public scorn the virtue which the traditions of 6,000 years have ennobled, when Thomas Hardy in Jude the Obscure revels in a lasciviousness which the Harpers are afraid to print in

their magazine but publish boldly in book form-when all this is done, every teacher and every parent, for the sake of righteousness and a social purity should join in the denunciation which reputable reviewers have already started.

A teacher should be glad to be called puritanic when it comes to such matters as this. To the plea of Millet and Whitman, and Tolstoi that anything in nature is in the province of art, he can reply that as long as the lily grows in the pond he prefers to linger and look at the pure white flower, the type of innocence, rather than dip his hands in the slimy scum that floats near it. We have sheltered ourselves long enough beneath the oft-quoted aphorism "To the pure all things are pure." We shall not, like Borromeo, walk with downcast eyes lest we shall see a woman, or be like Plotinus who was ashamed of his own body. We can, however, like the Rev. James Martineau, preach a sermon on "The Realm of Silence," and not like Walt Whitman, in the Leaves of Grass, or Swinburn, in Laus Veneris, make a plaything of voluptuousness.

We can, of course, go too far. I could never sympathize with the carping criticism against The Scarlet Letter, for I know of nothing in literature which pleads more earnestly or more eloquently for purity. I have read somewhere of a nude marble statue frequently reduced in bronze which represents a youth standing upright in the attitude of prayer, with head erect, countenance turned heavenward, hands clasped. A very devout old lady could see in this nothing but a vulgar suggestiveness and put it on the top shelf in a dark closet, but a good, pure-minded clergyman for years kept it on his study table where it was constantly a source of inspiration, helping him day by day toward a deeper faith and a higher trustfulness. If some see grossness in Venus de Milos, I am happy to say that for me the statue breathes a holier purity than any piece of statuary it has been my privilege to see.

Where then shall we make the distinction between the moral and the immoral in art? To me it seems to lie in its suggestiveness. If the artist's aim is pure, purity will be the lesson taught; if it is impure in its suggestiveness, morals have been sacrificed and the artist's work will lack permanency.

And this is the hopeful condition in the whole discussion-art with immoral suggestiveness does not endure..

When we have said all this the practical question naturally arises, What are we going to do about it? And in our answer we must refrain from beautiful theorizing; we must try to understand existing conditions, particularly the extent of human frailty.

In September, 1893, an international convention met in Switzerland to devise means for the suppression of all literature tending to degrade public morals. Enthusiasm for their cause was commendatory, but practical results were sacrificed because of the radical spirit of some of the delegates. One member, for instance, seriously proposed that authors of immoral books be seized bodily and be made to erase their offensive writings with their own tongues. Another suggested that editors of reputable newspapers should agree to exclude from their associations any fellow-member who disgraced, forgetting the practical difficulties of executing such a scheme. Another pleaded for legislation, but legislation to be effective must be supported by public sentiment. Our laws are good enough as they are. I am even convinced that their enforcement is oftentimes detrimental to public morality, as was illustrated several years ago when Mr. Wanamaker decreed that Tolstoi's Kreutzer Sonata should not be carried in the United States mail.

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The evil, like the evil of intemperance, is never going to pass out of our midst. We must content ourselves with earnest and prayerful endeavors to minimize it. The public schools, by their wise selections of supplementary reading matter, are now our most effective agencies. Sabbath schools are doing something, but the average Sunday school story is a weak, inane, unnatural sort of thing that has little attraction for healthy, vigorous youth. In our individual spheres we can do a great deal to see that unfortunate children are provided with good reading material, but we must not rest content when we have provided this literature -we must encourage the child to read it, and help him toward an appreciation of its beauty and truth. This course continued with the old children, will inevitably bring about good results.

To that class who have already grown mature, who have formed their tastes, little can be done. We can, however, by being honest with ourselves, by speaking boldly, fearlessly and without cavil, do much toward creating a healthy public sentiment. If a

certain literary cult goes wild over The Great God Pun, The Parasite, or The Woman Who Did, we need not follow them in their blindness, but true to that sense of purity which public morality has always taught, true to the principles of the Old Testament, beautifully reinforced by the new dispensation, we can utter against such publications earnest protestation or stinging rebuke.

The province of literature is a noble one. From the time of Beowulf, our Anglo-Saxon Epic, to Tennyson and Browning and Ruskin and Kipling, we have received the accumulated heritage of eighteen hundred years. Shall we be false to the traditions of the best of these masters, spurn their memory, and go searching for false gods? Shakespeare is speaking to us as powerfully as he spoke three hundred years ago. We have Spenser, and Milton, and Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Lowell, and Longfellow, and Whittier, and scores of others just as pure, Shall we forsake these and kneel to receive the empty benediction of Arthur Machan and Grant Allen and Sarah Grand? The mere juxtaposition of names suggests your answer. The French proverb L'Art pour Art -art for art's sake-will not excuse them. Let us cling to the literature of the right sort. It has led us away from the sordidness of every-day existence, out into the fresh, clear, morning air, redolent of joy and song, down into the shaded valley whose very solitude has suggested the presence of God, back into thoroughfares where it has communicated its message of love. Its sentiments have been to us a constant encouragement, warning us from temptation and inspiring us toward an ideal whose dominant spirit has been purity in thought and deed.

There is no emotion of the human heart that poetry has not touched-the playfulness of childhood, the ambitions of youth, courtship and love and motherhood-all these have been its sacred themes. To the mother sorrowing for her innocent baby's death, it has been a gentle comforter; to the erring heart of young manhood and young womanhood it has spoken words of warning; to the old gray-headed man approaching his decline, it has breathed hopeful, loving words. You rise from the reading of such themes as these, strengthened, purified and ennobled. How different is the influ

of Thomas Hardy, whose favorite theme is wantonness? He creates a fetid