100 YEARS AGO

Another of those disastrous hurricanes which occasionally visit the West Indies and United States at this season of the year has to be recorded. On the 8th Inst. a storm of great violence struck the coasts of Louisiana and Texas, and, owing to the thickly populated districts over which it swept and to the high water wave which accompanied it, immense destruction to property and lamentable loss of life ensued. The fury of the storm is said to have been felt for at least a hundred miles inland, but up to the present time scarcely any details have arrived as to its character and the exact path that it followed. This part of America is one of the three regions referred to in the works of Prof. W. M. Davis from which tropical storms move into temperate latitudes in the northern hemisphere; but we must wait for further details before it can be stated whether the one in question was of the nature of a tornado, which differs from an ordinary hurricane chiefly in its excessive violence over a small, instead of a large, area. From the description so far given, and from its duration, the storm would appear to have been of the nature of the worst West India hurricanes.

From Nature 13 September 1900.

50 YEARS AGO

Publication of the Report of the Royal Commission on Population has been followed by a series of papers, and the fifth volume… contains an important contribution on “The Economic Position of the Family”… The authors of this paper, after discussing the various ways in which parents meet the extra cost of bringing up children, by comparing their expenditure with that of childless couples having the same income, conclude, first, that at all income-levels parents have to make considerable economic sacrifices to maintain their children, and, secondly, that children in large families have a lower standard of living than children in smaller families… It would seem that, despite the large increase of prices and incomes, the actual money cost of a child to its parents, at a low working-class level of income, is substantially unchanged as compared with the pre-war figure. The burden of two children, which at this income-level was about a third of a childless couple's income, has now fallen to one-sixth. The raising of the school-leaving age, however, has meant that the burden lasts a year longer.

From Nature 16 September 1950.