THE LAW OF STORMS DEVELOPED. 387 



whose intro-moving winds, bearing the evaporations of the Asiatic 

 seas and oceans, feed it with meteoric fuel for six months in the year, 

 and whose periphery may be regarded as embracing nearly one-third 

 of the entire Eastern Hemisphere. Analogy, therefore, warrants the 

 idea of a great cyclone. But, apart from all this, actual observations 

 in different parts of the globe prove the frequency of storms of enor- 

 mous magnitude. Thus, in the celebrated Gulf -Stream storm of 1839, 

 as Sir David Brewster long ago pointed out, several stanch merchant- 

 men were foundering off the coast of Georgia, near Savannah, in the 

 very heart of the gale, at the same hour that the winds in its north- 

 west quadrant were taking the roofs off houses in New York and 

 Boston, more than 800 miles distant clearly revealing a cyclone 

 whose formation was symmetrical, and whose diameter must have 

 been nearly 1,300 miles. But, not to go back to old data, the West- 

 Indian storm of the 18th of August, 1871, before its centre had moved 

 north of Florida, had begun to draw upon the regions of high barom- 

 eter in the northern States, had exerted its influence as far north as New 

 London, Connecticut, and gave us the northeasterly cyclonic winds in 

 the northwest quadrant of the whirl, on the entire Atlantic coast. The 

 more furious cyclone of the 24th of August, discovered to be then south- 

 east of Florida, and telegraphically foreannounced as likely to endanger 

 the coasts of the Southern States in less than forty-eight hours, ap- 

 peared on the 26th in full force in Northern Florida, but not until 

 some eight or ten hours after it had set the atmosphere all around it 

 (as far north as Boston) in cyclonic motion, and had caused the storm- 

 cloud to spread itself over the entire region of the United States on 

 the eastern slopes of the Alleghanies, and as far westward as Knox- 

 ville, Tennessee. It is no uncommon thing, as Redfield, Espy, Henry, 

 Loomis, and others, long ago showed, for an area of depression on the 

 upper lakes to make itself simultaneously felt as far south as the Gulf 

 of Mexico, and as far east as New England. 



If it fell within the scope of the present design in this paper to 

 consider the final cause of storms, it would be easy to show that, 

 unless the law of storms ordained a large area, and a far extended 

 path for the meteor, in some degree commensurate with the area of 

 our immense continent, the meteor could not fulfil its office in the 

 terrestrial economy an office which, apparently, imposes upon it the 

 task of gathering to its centre, through the agency of its intro-moving 

 winds, the idle and inappreciable moisture scattered over the surface 

 of the earth, condensing it into rain and snow, and diffusing it, in 

 these forms, over immense districts of country. 



It is of incalculable importance to observe, and carefully digest 

 the fact, that, when a storm-centre or area of low barometer is once 

 formed, it is the nucleus for a vast aggregation and marshalling of 

 meteoric forces. No matter how small at first, under favorable 

 atmospheric conditions, the courant ascendant is formed, condensa- 



