THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, 1896.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 10035, 23 January 1896, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, 1896.

A terribly vivid picture of the intensity of the suffering caused by the recent heat wave that lias been passing over Australia is presented in the files of the Sydney papers. For several issues page after page is filled with nothing but brief but pregnant paragraphs, giving records and incidents of sun fire from every part of the country, while lengthened and detailed descriptions of what was transpiring in the streets of the city show that the severity of the weather absorbed the public attention to the exclusion of' nearly everything else. That great numbers of deaths occurred from the direct effects of the heat, and that suffering and exhaustion made life almost unendurable, can be readily understood, and the summer of 1696 has established a record that will never be forgotten by those who were subjected to such a terrible visitation. It appears that nothing equal to this has ever been known in New South Wales before, for though accounts of great heat have been given in the statements of early settlers, no authoritative or reliable records show the temperature to have approached that which accurate observation has proved to have been endured during the recent week or ten days of abnormal heat. At the Sydney Observatory, on a lofty elevation 150 feet above the level of the sea, the thermometer, placed in a position absolutely sheltered from everything but the winds blowing over it, showed 108'5 in the shade ; but that was only a feeble indication of the actual heat that must havo been endured also in the shade by the suffering people in the streets of the city where people congregate, surrounded by walls absorbing and diffusing the concentrated heat of the sun. What tho actual heat endured in the full glare of the pitiless rays was, may be best estimated from the fact given by the Government astronomer that a thermometer at the Observatory placed on the grass, and exposed to the full rays of the sun, registered the awful temperature of 237", At a distance of 160 miles from the shore vessels travelling from New Zealand are described as running into the heat as into " a bank of flame," and half way over from New Zealand vessels were caught in the heat wave; while away to the West all over Australia the phenomenal heat appears to have extended, Western Australia and South Australia suffering nearly as severely as New South Wales.

But coming back to the latter colony we find that at Jiourke, and over the plains of the Darling, the thermometer in the shade registered 120 degrees, and in soma oases over this. while from all directions came the news of children and old people, and even persons in the vigour of life, either stricken down suddenly, or sinking to death of sheer exhaustion. Such incidents as that of a mailman seeking refuge in a bathroom, and being there found dead, of another carried out of his galvanized hut and then dying; of horses falling dead in harness; of 84 funerals crowding to tho gates of the cemetery in one day, 1 are among the startling items that give vividness to the picture of the pitiless heat while fires sweeping over the country and even breaking out in the vicinity of the city, intensified the sufferings of the people. A simple but striking illustration more particularly of the condition to which the sick must have been reduced is given in the statement that the clinical thermometers used by medical men to note tho progress or declension of disease in the patients failed to act, the temperature of the atmosphere raising the mercury to such a degree as t.o .make the instruments useless for measuring the temperature of the human body. As a temperature of 10G degrees or thereabouts in a patient is almost surely fatal,, we can imagine the pitiful condition., of a sufferer bathed in an. atmosphere at a temperature df from 108 degrees to 120 degrees. ' ,•.lir -i' 1

Although tills excessive -heat has been • exceptional even for Australia, it is only one of the evils to which continental climates are always exposed. It is but ft selfish sentiment to indulge, in the face of so much suffering endured by our neighbours, but we cannot prevent a sense of satisfaction that the insular position gives us immunity from so terrible trials. America, equally with Australia, is liable to such intensity in its meteorological phenomena. It is only three or four years since New York in three days of excessive temperature, recorded more than six hundred citizens killed by the heat. Nor, so far as recorded temperature goes, has Sydney even in that trying week readied "a temperature that is not unusual in some other cities ,in Australia. The city of Melbourne, though so much further from the equator, showed a maximum in the summer of 1808 of 110' in the shade; in 1870 it was 109' j in 1875 it was 110 4; in 1876 it was 1107, and in 1882 it was 110'5; while in Adelaide in 1871 the reading of the thermometer showed 114" Yet in none of these cases does the suffering appear to have been so great or attended by so marked effects as under the late heat wave in New South Wales, questions of humidity in the atmosphere, and possibly even of familiarity with snaps of extreme heat having a considerable bearing on the sufferings experienced from a high degree of temperature. Itisanoteworthy fact that during all this period in which New South Wales as well as the whole of the southern portion of the continent has been enduring exceptional heat, the temperature at Brisbane, and throughout Queensland generally, was nothing abnormal,showing as the ease of Melbourne also shows, that latitude has less to do with these exceptional cases of excessive heat, than the direction which from some cause or another the great heat wave 'may take when sweeping over the country. As to the causes producing such an abnormal aberration from the ordinary course of meteorology, the scientists appear unfortunately to be unable to afford an explanation. It has been from something connected with, monsoonal influences we are told, which impinging somewhere away up about Port Darwin have been diverted by something into this eccentric swoop over Southern Australia. It is no doubt quite true that it does not seem to explain tilings, and we must wait for further data, and more extended observations, before we can either prognose the times, or discover the causes of these phenomena. It is possible that as cultivation extends and vegetation more generally spreads a sward over the sunbaked soil of interior Australia, the winds that swenp over its vast plains will cease to be superheated in their passage. At the present time, sweeping as they do for many hundreds of miles over bare or thinly-grassed soil, the temperature of which under the blazing sun is frequently itself of 140 degrees, it is not wonderful that these monsoonal winds or whatever they are, pour down like streams of fire over the eastern and southern colonies.