As for the frog that crawled under the box just in time to save himself, he was well and flourishing at the last accounts.

CYCLONES AND TORNADOES.

Science as yet has not been able to grasp the laws that govern cyclones.  They seem to be the result of some intensely electric condition of the elements, which finds an expression in that form.  Cyclones, until within a few years, meant those circular tempests encountered in the Pacific and Indian oceans.  They are the most destructive of all storms, being far more deadly than monsoons and tornadoes.

All navigators, when caught in a cyclone know how to get out of it.  They have only to sail at right angles to the wind, when they will either pass beyond the outer rim of the circular sweep, or reach the center, where the ocean is calm.

The diameters of the ocean cyclones range from fifty to five hundred or a thousand miles.  Professor Douglas, of Ann Arbor University, entertains his friends now and then by manufacturing miniature cyclones.  He first suspends a large copper plate by silken cords.  The plate is heavily charged with electricity, which hangs below in a bag-like mass.  He uses arsenious acid gas, which gives the electricity a greenish tint.  That mass of electricity becomes a perfect little cyclone.  It is funnel-shaped and spins around like a top.  When he moves the plate over a table, his cyclone catches up pennies, pens, pith balls and other small articles, and scatters them in every direction.

Cyclones never touch the equator, though the ocean ones are rare outside the torrid one.  They are caused by the meeting of contrary currents of winds, and are known under the names of hurricanes, typhoons, whirlwinds or tornadoes.  Those terrifying outbursts which now and then cause so much destruction in our own country seem to be the concentration of the prodigious force of an immense ocean cyclone within a small space, which renders them resistless.

A writer in the N.  Y. Herald gives some interesting facts regarding these scourges of the air.  While the cyclone, as we have shown, may have a diameter of hundreds of miles, the track of a tornado is often limited to a few hundred feet, and rarely has the width of half a mile.

The cyclone carries with it a velocity of as much as 100 to 140 miles an hour.  It sends a certain amount of warning ahead of its track, and the acceleration of the wind’s speed at any given point, is gradual.

The tornado falls almost without notice, or rather the indications are often so similar to those of an ordinary thunderstorm that only a skilled and careful observer can detect the difference.