squabs or bees, instead of hens, to their fruit and garden as stock managed to clear about the same sum during the second year, which sum they have increased annually. This is a particularly good showing in consideration of the fact that living expenses are much lower in Westwood than in the city. Less expensive clothes are the rule, car-fares and similar city expenses are reduced to a minimum, and all the food, with the exception of meat and fish, is practically grown on the acreage at a nominal cost, and social and other demands upon cash are not excessive.

The community, however, is not entirely hard-working. The members have leisure enough to carry on several clubs -musical, art, educational, sociological and merely social. The founder of the Association, George Elmer Littlefield, has the largest house, at the entrance to the Farm and facing the Lake; it is there that most of the social gatherings are held as well as the quarterly business meetings, at which the accounts are audited, dividends paid and improvements suggested.

The manner of life that Mr. Littlefield leads illustrates the one principle of Fellowship Farm which is considered by the members and outside students of the plan, as its saving grace. This principle maintains that every member, willy-nilly, ought not to be expected to dig in the dirt to a livelihood extent or to rear

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stock for commercial return. Allowances are made for individualism. Mr. Littlefield happens scientifically to have studied agriculture and is, therefore, able to extract the utmost radish and squash from his acre. Chiefly, however, he is a printer. He has built a print-shop alongside his home, where he gets out a monthly magazine and job-work. He furnishes employment, on an inside co-operative basis, to a printer (a single member who built his house out of two packing cases at a cost of $16.00); to a lithographer, Arthur Siebelist, who has the honor of being father of the first baby born on the Farm; and to Frances Lyons, an illustrator.

Miss Lyons is a student of arts and crafts as well. She camped in a tent while she built her home, "Studio House," almost entirely by herself, having help only with the heavy timbers.

This allowance for individuality has evolved several inside co-operative plans, quite apart from those of the Association. A retired school teacher, who had a pretty single-room house built with some of her savings, is not strong enough for outdoor work. She buys the supplies and does the cooking and housekeeping for three single members, who cultivate and care for her acre in return. Also, the egg-raising members have combined and employ a member with more of a business than an agricultural bent to market their output.

ON'T blame anything but the storm centers. They are the cause of agitation throughout the greater part of both the Eastern and Western hemispheres. In their playful gyrations they have gotten off their accustomed track, and have disturbed the climate of the globe.

That's the answer in a nutshell. That's why the Eastern and Middle States swel

tered through last summer in temperatures not before reached in years, and then a few months later suffered the rigors of a record-breaking winter. That's why Europe was visited by an inferno, week after week, during the summer season of 1911; and the storm centers explain a most remarkable phenomenon in Northwest North America.

Alaska's climate has been revolutionized. Winter cold has given away to a

so many million timbers east of the Rocky Mountains in 1911-12.

Year by year the meteorologists are coming to have a larger grasp upon world weather. Long ago they learned that weather cannot be studied locally, but that a broad sweep of a continent, at least, is necessary for intelligent observation. Yet even this is insufficient, and the next generation will see all the important points of the globe linked together in an international weather bureau that will be

mal path. But just lately some cosmic or extra-cosmic force has thrown them far to the northward, and at the same timeundoubtedly the conditions are relatedhas brought northward and expanded the normal high-pressure atmospheric zone that should center in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the South Atlantic States.

"The shifting of the storm centers northward gives Alaska a warm winter, and the variation in the high pressure belt gives the Eastern States a super

heated summer," the weather bureau officials explain.

Then there's another high pressure area that ordinarily maintains its habitat somewhere around the Azores. Last summer this belt became loosed from its moorings, and shifted "twelve degrees farther north and fifteen degrees farther east than in 1910," as H. E. Rawson explains in the Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society; with the result that the British Isles and all Europe suffered from immoderate heat.

Usually the storm centers, as they cross the Pacific, follow the "Great Circle" course of the trans-Pacific liners, and many a steamship out from Yokohama for Puget Sound or Vancouver, has been attended for days by a tempest that would scarcely have been felt a few leagues north or south. Frequently the atmospheric disturbances and the liners travel at the same speed. This Great Circle route swings so far to the northward, in taking advantage of the earth's curvature, that it comes within two or three hundred miles of the Aleutian Islands, fringing Bering Sea.

The last year, however, the steamships have been left alone by the storm centers, for instead of skirting the margin of the Pacific, the low pressure areas have leaped across the divide into Bering Sea,

and have struck the American continent in the vicinity of Nome, taking an inside route and sweeping down through the Canadian provinces. They carry with them as they come southward the veritable breath of the Arctic, chilling to the marrow everything in their path, far down into the States.

It may seem hard to understand why the erratic storm centers should bring spring to Alaska, and ice to the interior regions farther south, but the weather man has an explanation right at hand. Passing inland through Alaska each storm center draws toward its swirling vortex both the warm air of the south and the frigid atmosphere of the Arctic. This warm air is drawn in from the Pacific across the coasts of Alaska, as the storm sweeps eastward, but as the center goes inland it gains less and less of the temperate breezes of the Pacific, and more and more of the Arctic blizzard.

Not only are the coasts of Alaska warmed to an unusual degree, but the procession of storm centers introduces a continual inflow of balmy atmosphere into the interior regions, producing in 1911-12 in the Yukon Valley the mildest winter in its history.

"But Alaska's normal temperature isn't severe," insists J. L. McPherson, secretary of the Alaska Bureau of the

New Chamber of Commerce, Seattle. "The latest and most accurate isothermal maps of North America show that the isothermal line of thirty degrees passes through Seward, Valdez, Juneau and other towns along the Alaska coast, swings far to the southward, hugging the coast, passes through New Mexico, and on out through New York City.

"New Yorkers would find it hard to believe that their climate averages up with the Alaska coast.

"The isothermal line of Nome and the Yukon Valley runs down into the Dakotas."

Little or no snow fell along the Alaska Gulf coast up to the first of January, 1912, and in early March the official spring clean-up of Juneau was in progress, it being the custom of the Alaskan capital to wash down the sidewalks with the fire hose each year as soon as the snow has melted. By the latter part of March the winter trail was breaking up between Chitina, on the Copper River & Northwestern Railway, and Fairbanks, stranding large shipments of supplies that were going over the snow on sleds.

February in Dawson was so mild that the oldest inhabitant didn't have courage to open his mouth with stories of the past. By the beginning of March the happy Dawsonites were bringing in garlands of pussy-willows. An open air An open air dance was given on the fifteenth of March.

Even last year the climatic change was beginning to be felt on Bering Sea, for the ice was thinner and went out several weeks earlier than usual; this year navigation on Bering Sea was open fully two months in advance of the average for the last decade.

Another strange feature of Alaskan conditions is the fact that glaciers that have been quiescent for long periods of years perhaps half a century—are wakening into life, and are moving at surprising speed into the sea. The year of 1910 was marked as the beginning of this era of motion, and some most interesting observations were made during that season by Professor Lawrence Martin, leader of an expedition sent out by the National Geographic Society.

The Martin expedition found that

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liam Sound, had retreated three miles since it had been explored and mapped in 1899 by the E. H. Harriman Scientific expedition.

In 1911 another movement was apparent in most of the glaciers of the Alaskan coast, and the climatic conditions of the last winter may determine the question perplexing geographers whether the advance and retreat of glaciers is due to climatic effects, or to some other cause, possibly earthquakes.

The theory of the storm centers as changing the climate of Alaska and the North Pacific Coast-for British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California have also had an unusually pleasant winter-does not altogether satisfy all the navigators and local observers. Their theory is that volcanic action, perhaps coincident with the earthquake shocks just mentioned, disturbed the currents of the sea, shifting the warm Japan current more directly to the eastward, and intensifying its temperate influence upon the American shore. Shipmasters in steaming from Seattle to the vicinity of Cape St. Elias, steering by dead reckoning all the way, found themselves fifty miles ahead of their log, and observed that the water was warmer than usual.

But the weather bureau officials do not put much stock in this supposition, for, they say, "the old physical geographies were wrong in indicating the Japan current as sweeping around the northern border of the Pacific, and warming all the adjacent shore; the truth of the matter is that the Japan current does nothing of the kind. It disappears three or four hundred miles after it leaves the coast of Japan, just as the Gulf Stream disappears a short distance after it passes beyond Newfoundland, though it was once supposed to cross the Atlantic, and warm the British Isles.

"The temperate climate of the upper Pacific Coast is due to the winds which blow in from the Pacific Ocean, which is warmer than the land. The chill winter climate of New England is not due to the so-called Labrador current, but to the prevailing land winds. England's mild climate is not attributable to any ocean current, but again to the prevailing southerly winds from the warmer