Part 3 — PHENOMENA OF HAZE, FOGS, AND CLOUDS.

The predominant haze, which generally envelops the landscape and reddens the sun and moon during long droughts, is usually ascribed to smoke from burning woods and forests, pervading the air. I have observed a similar prevalent haze, connected with other extensive droughts than the one from which the country is now (August) suffering, and have invariably heard the same vague and inadequate cause assigned. Observation proves conclusively, that the assigned is not the true general cause (although it has its purely local effect), as with winds, for days together, in opposite quarters from local fires on mountain or plain, such widespread districts remain enveloped in haze, although hundreds of miles distant. Neither over such districts was there any odor as from smoke pervading the atmosphere (except temporarily from some neighboring chimneys, which the then heavy air kept near the earth), nor felt by the eyes, which very perceptibly smart when exposed to smoke. It is impossible, with varying winds, that mere local fires should spread smoke so uniformly as to comprise most of the area of the drought, which on this occasion extended from our great western lakes to the Atlantic seacoast; and anomalously, too, that it should have continued so long after a rain had extinguished those fires.

I should assign a very different cause for this phenomenon. Rain drops are negatively electric, while suspended moisture, such as fog, displays itself in the form of vesicles or globules, distended by the presence and prevalence of positive electricity, which refracts the rays of light from so many myriad surfaces, that all objects are thus, necessarily, obscured to the eye. During droughts, when haze prevails, positive electricity in the air becomes in excess, which is heating, and therefore serves still more to subdivide, as well as to expand or distend the floating moisture in the atmosphere (of which it is never entirely deprived) into infinitesimal vesicles, or globules, like minute soap bubbles, and thus from such an infinite number of refracting surfaces is produced the haze, as well as the obscuration of the landscape and the reddened disks of the sun and moon, by the absorption of their heat or red rays, so characteristic of great droughts. This same infinitesimal vesicular condition of suspended moisture, is also the sufficient cause of there being no deposition of dew on such occasions, except where a local change of electric condition cools the air, thus temporarily clearing the atmosphere, and permitting a local deposition of the previously suspended moisture, in the form of dew.

All fogs are due to this same cause, as well as that which, in extreme wintry cold, overhangs the open water, as it yields its comparative heat to the air. The formation and suspension of clouds, in all their varied characteristics, have the same origin. That highly attenuated haze which invests the distant landscape, particularly mountains, with its magical purple hue, is due to the same, but still more ethereal interposition of infinitesimal globules of suspended moisture. In corroboration of this being the true explanation of the phenomena of haze, fogs, etc., is the fact, that as soon as clouds prevail, denoting an electric change in the atmosphere, all haze immediately disappears, or becomes embraced in the larger vesicles or globules, forming clouds.