A BUNDLE OF METEOROLOGICAL PARADOXES. 1 



Bv W. .T. Humphreys. 



The scientific paradox is only an exception to some familiar but 

 too inclusive generalization. It, therefore, has both the appeal of 

 the riddle and the charm of surprise — the surprise, the instant the 

 truth is seen, of a sudden and unexpected discovery — and thus affords 

 the same sort of intellectual delight that I once knew a student of 

 geometry to experience. The proposition, one of Euclid's best, was 

 the -Pythagorean, often carelessly called the pons asinorum. The 

 boy in question was of that sturdy type that always insists on being 

 " shown," and not understanding this proposition, flatly refused to 

 accept it. A little coaching at the blackboard, however, soon got 

 him past his initial troubles and so fixed his attention that as the 

 truth flashed upon him with the final " therefore," he blurted out, 

 in the ecstatic surprise of an Archimedes, and with the same oblivion 

 to his surroundings : 



" Well, I'll be damned if it ain't so." 



"Whether the following paradoxes do or do not evoke such joyous 

 acclamations as the one just quoted, they, nevertheless, deserve to be 

 concisely stated and fully explained for they express important 

 facts of nature, unknown to, or, at most, but vaguely realized by the 

 average person. 



AIR PUSHED NORTH BLOWS EAST. 



This paradoxical behavior of the air is restricted, it should be said, 

 to the Northern Hemisphere; but it seems just as contrarious on the 

 other side of the Equator, for there, pushed north it blows west, 

 pushed south it blows east. 



The push that causes the winds to blow is due to the existence of 

 unequal amounts of air above a given level over adjacent regions — 

 more at the place from which the air is pushed than at the place 

 toward which it is pushed — and this in turn, usuall}', is due to the 

 temperature differences, level for level, between the atmosphere at 



1 Address of the retiring president of the Philosophical Society of Washington, delivered 

 Jan. 31, 1920. Reprinted by permission from the Journal of the Washington Academy of 

 Sciences, vol. 10, No. 6, Mar. 19, 1920. 



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