344 PHILOSOPHY OF STORMS. 



" Every thing seems to have corroborated Mr. Espy's 

 1 Philosophy of Storms/ and every thing to militate against 

 every other explanation of such violent atmospheric com- 

 motion. In the first place, the oppressive heat of the fore- 

 noon, and particularly just before the storm, resulting from 

 the evolution of the heat from compression in the advance 

 annulus of the storm. Second, the roaring sound of the 

 wind from east to south west, gradually as the tornado was 

 passing, keeping constantly toward the centre of the track. 

 Third, the extreme depression of the barometer while the 

 storm was raging, and the explosion outward of nearly every 

 room and building in the city. Very often, perhaps, in one 

 hundred cases, the gables of houses both blew out, even in 

 the very teeth of a wind raging at several hundred feet per 

 second ! Close hatches were blown open upward, and a 

 desk containing only one and a half cubic feet of atmos- 

 phere to each apartment, burst the locks off its three doors. 

 Fourth, trees were pulled up by the roots and carried sev- 

 eral yards, and then fell without breaking their limbs; and 

 this happened with the largest trees. Men were picked up 

 and carried to a distance and let down without violence or 

 injury. 



"On the two margins of the storm, the limbs and leaves 

 of trees fell in great numbers, and the tin from the roofs of 

 buildings was found twenty miles hence, and a piece of a 

 steamboat window was recognised thirty miles north east 

 from Natchez. Fifth, the position of trees was demonstration 

 complete, in the absence of other evidence. The nearer 

 the axis of the tornado, the nearer were their bearings par- 

 allel with that axis, and the more remote, the nearer per- 

 pendicular, while those that point to the direction from 

 which the storm came, or cross a line perpendicular to the 

 axis, lie beneath those that point in the forward direction 

 of the same. This, you know, is the necessary position 

 upon the hypothesis of concentric motion, while a cur- 



