Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE INCOMPLETENESS OF THE WEATHER CONQUEST. The struggle with the weather riot only has its bad results, but it is still incomplete. No sooner do we perfect one means of protection than our requirements change and a readjustment is necessary. A protection from the ordinary weather is not sufficient for the extraordinary. Some years ago a prominent Eastern engineer was called to a new Western city to devise a system of sewers. "What is your largest rainfall per hour ? " he asked. " A third of an inch," was the answer. To be quite safe, the engineer constructed the sewers to carry off a rainfall twice as heavy. But hardly were the sewers completed when still heavier rainfalls than those provided for occurred, and that city has still to submit to occasional overflows of the streets from rainfalls greater than those for which the sewers were constructed. Similar miscalculations are sometimes found in theplumbing in our houses and in many other ways. Weather for which we are not prepared is met with oftenest by persons engaged in open- air pursuits. The farmer feels this with especial bitterness. There is hardly a variation from average weather which is not injurious to him, for nearly all that he has lies exposed to the weather. Now it is the unexpected summer shower which destroys his hay ; again, it is a capful of wind that lays down his best wheat and oats until it so increases the cost of harvesting that his profits disappear ; an untimely frost, or drought, or rain, or snow, or wind may destroy a large part of his season's work. The stock grower is hardly less fortunate. In the geological strata of the Western plains are found what are called bone beds—places where there are enormous accumulations of fossil bones. From them geologists have been able to r...