16 PHILOSOPHY OF STORMS. 



wind must have blown at the ground in the yard, as mani- 

 fested by the direction in which the trees were lying. It 

 carried off shingles, and hats, and books, and various gar- 

 ments, and branches, and leaves of trees, and other light 

 bodies, and threw them down on the north side of the spout, 

 in a band of about four or five miles broad, and terminating 

 on the north eastern side of Staten Island, about fifteen miles 

 from Amboy, where the spout ceased to reach the earth, and 

 twenty-five from where it took up the shingles. It threw 

 these materials down along with a severe shower of hail 

 and rain. These materials were seen to fall with hail and 

 rain by a great number of witnesses whom I examined dur- 

 ing the week which I spent investigating this spout. There 

 was no hail and rain, at least as far as I could learn, on the 

 path of the spout ; it began about a mile on the north side 

 of it, and became heavier a little further still, and then 

 gradually diminished again as it approached the northern 

 border. The hail was confined to the middle of the band. 



33. After completing my examination of the Brunswick 

 spout, I visited the tracks of nine others in New Jersey, 

 New York, and Pennsylvania. They all exhibited the 

 same phenomena as regards the direction in which the trees 

 were prostrated, all being inwards and forwards. Two of 

 these were of the present year, and I remarked in each of 

 them, where they passed through fields of corn, that the 

 stalks lay with perfect regularity those on the north side 

 of the path towards the south east, and those on south 

 side towards north east, making nearly an exact right angle 

 with each other. The only exception to this uniform regu- 

 larity was, that in the Brunswick spout, three patches^ 

 nearly circular, with diameters equal to the width of the 

 spout, were found with the tops of the trees all thrown in- 

 wards towards one common centre. 



In the middle of one of these stood a large house, which 

 had its roof carried off, and the trees all round the house 



