474 PHILOSOPHY OF STORMS. 



by Mr. E. Smith, of Liverpool, in which were given one 

 hundred and forty-one accounts, taken from the local news- 

 papers in various parts of Ireland, Scotland, and England. 

 The objects of the narrators of these facts were to give ac- 

 counts of the damage done by the storm, and it was only 

 incidentally that they give meteorological facts. When 

 they did give them, they are brief, and somewhat meagre 

 and obscure; but they were unprejudiced, and so far worthy 

 of confidence. That there might be no unfair selection of 

 these facts, it was proposed to give all that the book con- 

 tained that were intelligible. But, before going into these 

 facts, it might be well to say a few words on the recognised 

 laws of nature which governed and determined the great 

 general movements of the atmosphere. Dr. Dalton had 

 made us pretty fully acquainted with the nature and pro- 

 perties of those aeriform fluids which constituted our atmos- 

 phere, and he also explained the true causes which deter- 

 mined the motions of the two great atmospheric currents 

 which flowed from the equater to the pole, and back again 

 from the pole to the equator; but it was afterwards found, 

 that Hadley had long previously made the same discovery, 

 although it was not generally known. [Hadley's theory was 

 here explained, with the assistance of a terrestrial globe 

 and a diagram.] But, though the theory first made known 

 by Hadley was generally, it was not universally true. The 

 south west was not always the upper, and the north east 

 the lower atmospheric current in the northern hemisphere. 

 In this part of the world, the south west is the prevalent 

 wind in autumn, and the north east prevails in March. In 

 January, that is at the time when our storm occurred, we 

 have fluctuations between the south west and north east 

 currents, sometimes the one and sometimes the other pre- 

 vailing. On the night of Sunday, January 6th, 1839, the 

 storm more particularly under consideration began its rav- 

 ages ; and Mr. Espy confined his remarks to, and arrowed 



