HURRICANE

(Span, huraenn.) A violent storm, generally accompanied by thunder and lighUiing, and distinguished from every other kind of tempest by the veheij the wind, and the sudden changes to which it is subject. Hurricanes prevail chiefly in the East and West iif France, and in some parts of China. The following graphic description of the usual phenomena attending the West Indian hurricanes, from the l>cn of Edmund Burke, may be interesting to the reader: l,It is in the rainy season, principally in the month of August, more rarely in July and September, that they are a aulted by burricatics, the most terrible calamity to which they are subject from • ite. This destroys at one stroke the labour of many years, and frustrates the most exalted hopes of the planter, and often just at the moment when he thinks himself out of the reach of fortune. It is a sudden and violent storm of wind, rain, thunder, and lightning, attended with a veiling of the sea, and sometimes with an earthquake;in short, with every circumstnnce which tlte elements can a emble that is terrible and destructive. First they sec, as a prelude to the ensuing havoc, whole fields of sugar canes whirled into the air, and scattered over the face of die country. The strongest trees of the forest are lorn up by the roots and driven about like stubble. Their windmills are swept away in a moment. Their works, their fixtures, the ponderous copper-boilers and stills of several hundred weight, are wrenched from the ground and battered to pieces. Their houses are no protection; the roofs are torn off at one blast, while the rain, which in an hour rises five feet, rushes in upon them with an irresistible violence. There are signs which the Indians of these islands taught our planters, by which they can prognosticate the approach of a hurricane. It comes on either in the quarters,or at the full or change of the moon. If it will come on at the full moon, you being at the change, observe these signs. That day you will see the sky very turbulent. You will observe the sun more red than at other times. You will perceive a dead calm, and the hills clear of all those clouds and mists which usually hover about them. In the clefts of the earth, and in the wells, you will hear a hollow, rambling sound like the rushing of a great wind. At night tile stars seem much larger than usual, and surrounded with a son of burs. The north-west sky has a sort of menacing look, and the sea emits a strong smell, and rises into vast wares, often without any wind. The wind itself now forsakes its usually steady easterly stream, and shifts about to [s. 585]