Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871 [PAGE 166]

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158 with the seasons, bringing us under continually newflfttmditions and for the action of our local thunder showers, in breaking up our long droughts. When once this spongy soil of the westwrith its varied products of trees and herbage, becomes thoroughly drenHied and flooded with water, exhaling by myriads of hogsheads every hour from its surfaces of leaves and plants, as well as intensely evaporating from every foot of its hot and spongy surface, the lower surface winds, whose office it is, as feeders, to lick up this watery vapor, and bear it upward to the bosom of those great storm-bearing clouds, that perpetually sail over our heads from the southwest, the surface of the whole country then becomes almost infinitely more productive of the materials for rain than any ocean possibly can be, and what is spilled down on us at one point, one hour, is soon gathered up again, and spilled down at some other point, the next. It seems to rain so easy, that it can almost do it without clouds of any sort; and it does seem as though it never could stop raining. But as the sun advances, this rain-belt swings on to the north of u s ; and the increasing power of the hot suns, and the dry south and west surface winds lick up again all surplus moisture, and bear it over to the rain-belt already passed to the north of us. And now the reverse condition soon ensues. Nothing is left on the hot, dry surface out of which rain can be made. The heavens and the earth seem changed to iron and brass; clouds, of threatening andportentious look, in the great southwest currents, are soon dissolved into thin and treacherous air again; it tries hard, day after day, but it really seems that it never will, or can, rain again; and so far as these great upper southwestern storm-clouds are concerned, it never could begin again. But right here the entirely new system of our local northwest thunder storms set in, to break up this terrible drought, and prepare new material for again feeding those greater resources of rain and of storm. The excessive heat and drought itself seems to engender these local thunder storms ; they gather here and there, before our very eyes, the surface winds at first always blowing toward their centers to feed them, and finally, whirling them off with terrific force and grandeur, to scatter their accumulated rain over acres,, or townships, or whole counties, here and there, till thus the whole country becomes sufficiently wet to render the recurrence of the great southwest storms possible again. This usually comes round in September, if not before, when the rainbelt again reaches us in. its second, swing toward the south. Nothing can be more simple in fact, or more sublime and beneficent than this perpetual action and re-action, this everlasting play and inter-play of these two great complementary systems of southwestern and northwest-