We try to explain all things by the action of wind and wave; yet in the air there is a force which is not the wind, and in the waters a force which is not the wave.  That force, both in the air and in the water, is effluvium.  Air and water are two nearly identical liquid masses, entering into the composition of each other by condensation and dilatation, so that to breathe is to drink.  Effluvium alone is fluid.  The wind and the wave are only impulses; effluvium is a current.  The wind is visible in clouds, the wave is visible in foam; effluvium is invisible.  From time to time, however, it says, “I am here.”  Its “I am here” is a clap of thunder.

The snowstorm offers a problem analogous to the dry fog.  If the solution of the callina of the Spaniards and the quobar of the Ethiopians be possible, assuredly that solution will be achieved by attentive observation of magnetic effluvium.

Without effluvium a crowd of circumstances would remain enigmatic.  Strictly speaking, the changes in the velocity of the wind, varying from 3 feet per second to 220 feet, would supply a reason for the variations of the waves rising from 3 inches in a calm sea to 36 feet in a raging one.  Strictly speaking, the horizontal direction of the winds, even in a squall, enables us to understand how it is that a wave 30 feet high can be 1,500 feet long.  But why are the waves of the Pacific four times higher near America than near Asia; that is to say, higher in the East than in the West?  Why is the contrary true of the Atlantic?  Why, under the Equator, are they highest in the middle of the sea?  Wherefore these deviations in the swell of the ocean?  This is what magnetic effluvium, combined with terrestrial rotation and sidereal attraction, can alone explain.

Is not this mysterious complication needed to explain an oscillation of the wind veering, for instance, by the west from south-east to north-east, then suddenly returning in the same great curve from north-east to south-east, so as to make in thirty-six hours a prodigious circuit of 560 degrees?  Such was the preface to the snowstorm of March 17, 1867.

The storm-waves of Australia reach a height of 80 feet; this fact is connected with the vicinity of the Pole.  Storms in those latitudes result less from disorder of the winds than from submarine electrical discharges.  In the year 1866 the transatlantic cable was disturbed at regular intervals in its working for two hours in the twenty-four—­from noon to two o’clock—­by a sort of intermittent fever.  Certain compositions and decompositions of forces produce phenomena, and impose themselves on the calculations of the seaman under pain of shipwreck.  The day that navigation, now a routine, shall become a mathematic; the day we shall, for instance, seek to know why it is that in our regions hot winds come sometimes from the north, and cold winds from the south; the day we shall understand that diminutions of temperature