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wave in the Atlantic, and there were shocks at Memphis, Tennessee, on June 14. There was a tidal wave in Lake Michigan on June 18. A mass of fire fell from the sky on the 20th, on a town in Massachusetts. At the same time quakes occurred in Italy and France. On the 24th, a great meteor shot over Cape Town. Durango, Mexico had its first rain in four years. Glare in the sky alarmed Germans on the 26th. In England, people watched a luminous cloud at night. Quakes were reported in Tasmania and Australia. r ““y Meteor from an organic cloud, seen by J. Plant, F.S.S., Salford, England, November 23, 1877 - - t The first year of the “Incredible Decade.” SMALL BATTLE Why recite all those things? Why imply a relationship? Because it is a part of our present purpose to indicate that earthquakes and local storms may be engendered by huge masses of space material passing close to the terrestrial surface. That storm across Georgia, from the phrase, "A black tornado, filled with fire," does not have to be considered extranormal just from that description. Tornadoes are black, and they often involve brilliant and vicious displays of electrics. on OUTER EDGES, NOT IN MIDDLE "FILL" It is the concomitants which cause us to wonder. The events which we mentioned spread over a rather long time to be in any way connected with one local storm, but there does seem to be a family resemblance, and there are many such examples. Yet in view of the concomitants, and since we do not have a definite statement that the storm was a twister, the term, tornado, being frequently used loosely, we wonder if there were extensive gravitational irregularities, or if something was made to surge through our lower atmosphere, thereby creating a vehement Hack cloud, filled with fire, which was only a detail in a world-wide melee. Could we have had the close approach of a vast scattering of space debris, through which the earth passed during a period of several days, and from which we had meteorites, water, dust, cold, etc., and disruption of the normal meteorological processes over most of our globe, not to speak of seismic upheavals on a wide scale? The instances of apparent association between clouds, meteors, and quakes are many. It seems like stretching things too far to claim that all are merely coincidence. For four hours, in the wake of the Georgia storm, on January 8, dust fell on northern Indiana—no records of such in between. Research fails to disclose any volcanic action to put dust into the air, and if it did, what of the intervening places? There was no dust bowl in Georgia, and besides this storm, as is general, was moving eastward, not northward. From the western deserts—a long way to carry a heavy fall of dust without dropping noticeable amounts! Could it be that the dust was not from Georgia's tornado, but from the common cause of both? 79