328 PHILOSOPHY OF STORMS. 



We have now established, by a fair induction, that there 

 was a powerful current of air from the opposite sides of the 

 track towards some point in the centre of the track, and 

 that here there was also a powerful current upward. 

 What was the nature of this ascending current? Was it 

 accompanied by gyration ? This question I think we are 

 able to answer. The furniture of the house D was scat- 

 tered in very various directions. The house itself, and the 

 more substantial part of the furniture were carried in the 

 direction of the barn ; portions of the wagon, however, lay 

 strewed in every direction from east to north east ; leaves 

 of books were found attached to bushes by the road in an 

 east direction ; a tin pail and various light articles were 

 found in the woods opposite the house G, and in a direction 

 S. E. from D ; and a piece of a clock was found in a north 

 west direction from D, in the apple orchard. The plough, 

 which was between the houses C and D, was obviously 

 carried round nearly an entire circumference, for it left clear 

 marks of its course on the ground. We find the same evi- 

 dence of a gyral motion in the directions of the trees which 

 fell near the middle of the track. Take the case of the four 

 trees I have mentioned in front of the house G. They lie 

 parallel to each other, side by side, and fell nearly at right 

 angles to the track of the hurricane. Yet the tops of two of 

 them incline to the north, and those of the other two to the 

 south. Here there were two winds which blew, we cannot 

 suppose simultaneously, 1 but successively, from opposite 

 points of the compass at the very same spot, and the two 

 winds must have succeeded each other at an interval not 

 exceeding a minute, for the violence of the hurricane was 

 past in about that time. The preceding, moreover, is a 

 phenomenon which occurred not in one spot merely, but all 

 along the centre of the track. Every where there is the 



1 Why not simultaneously ? AUTHOR. 



