1864.] 405 [Chase. 



Spencer Miller was appointed to prepare an olDituary notice 

 of the deceased. 



The death of Josiah Quincy, LL.D., at Quincy, Mass., on 

 the 1st inst., aged 92, was announced by Mr. Lesley, and 

 Dr. Jared Sparks was appointed to prepare an obituary 

 notice of the deceased. 



The death of Thomas Dunlap, Esq., at Philadelphia, on 

 the 11th inst., aged 70, was announced by Mr. Fraley, and 

 Mr. William M. Meredith was appointed to deliver an obi- 

 tuary notice of the deceased. 



Mr. Chase read a note on the Daily Aerial Tides that are 

 attributable to the Lunar and Solar Attraction and Varia- 

 tions in Temperature. 



The powerful and prejudicial influence of an inveterate scientific 

 error, is shown in the following dogmatical statement of Mr. Jos-eph 

 John Murphy, an investigator who has lent useful aid to meteoro- 

 logical science. f 



In the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal for April, 1864, y. 

 183, he says : " Were the atmosphere not acted on by heat, it would 

 be everywhere at rest, and every level surface, at whatever height, 

 would be an isobarometric surface The earth's rotation can- 

 not produce currents, but it modifies them when they are produced 

 by the action of heat." 



There can be no doubt that heat is one of the causes, and in most 

 places it is, perhaps, the principal cause, of those atmospheric dis- 

 turbances which are modified by rotation, but the assumption that 

 the atmosphere "would be every where at rest," except for diiferences. 

 of temperature, leads to palpable absurdities. | 



It may be freely admitted that Galileo, in attributing the ocean 



* From the Proceedings of the Ameiican Philosophical Society. 



t Mr. Murphy was an early and independent advocate of so much of Mr. Wil- 

 liam Ferrel's theory, as explains the polar depression of the barometer by 

 centrifugal force and friction. Mr. Ferrel's paper, which appears to have been 

 the first publication that contained a true explanation of the equatorial as well as 

 the polar barometric depression, of the maxima near the parallels of 30°, and of 

 the cause of the rotatory motion of storms, was printed in the Nashville JouruaJ 

 of Medicine and Surgery, and afterwards in pamphlet form, in the summer of 

 1856. The subject was treated at greater length, in his essay on " the motion of 

 fluids and solids relative to the earth's surface," which was published in th& 

 "Mathematical Monthly" for 1859, vol. i, p. 140, sqq. 



I See Proc. Am. Philos. See, yol. ix, pp. 283-4. 



