re a ; Pe 
328 Proceedings of the British Association. 
however depended on the longitude than on the latitude of places. 
The barometer was at its minimum at Cape Wrath, in the N.N. W. 
corner of Scotland, two hours and a half sooner than at the Calf 
of Man, five hours sooner than at Edinburgh, and thirteen hours 
and a half sooner than at Thwaite, in Suffolk. Mr. Espy then 
stated that he had examined the data furnished by Col. Reid, of 
several hurricanes in the West Indies, and found conclusive evi- 
dence that the wind blew inwards to a central space in all these 
storms. Diagrams of two were exhibited :—one on the 3d of Oc- 
tober, 1780, in which Savannah-la-Mar was destroyed. In that 
storm, at its very height, the wind at Savannah-la-Mar, on the 
south side of the island of Jamaica, was south,—and nearly oppo- 
site to that point, on the north side of the island, the wind was _ 
N. E., or nearly in an opposite direction, for two hours at the time 
of the greatest violence of the storm at both places. The other 
storm was.on the 18th of August, 1837, off Charleston, 8. E. 
On that day, the ship Duke of Manchester had the centre of the 
storm pass over her, and on the same day, the West Indian and 
the Rawlins, which were on the southwest of the Duke of Man- 
chester, had the wind all day from 2 A. M. southwest, and at the 
same time the Cicero and the Yolof, on the N. E. of the Duke of 
Manchester, had the wind N. E. and E. N. BK. The Yolof all 
day, till 8 P.M. Mr. Espy then stated that he had visited the 
tracks of eighteen tornadoes, and examined several of them with 
great care, and found that all the phenomena told one tale,—the 
inward motion of the air to the centre of the inverted cone of 
cloud as it passed along the surface of the earth. From all these 
facts he demonstrated that there is an inward motion of the alt 
towards the centre of storms from all sides; and that this is the 
inference which ought to be drawn from the well-known fact, 
that the barometer stands lower in the midst of a storm than lt 
does all round its borders. The difficulty is, to account for the 
continued depression of the barometer, notwithstanding the great 
rush of air at the surface of the earth towards the place where the 
barometer stands lowest. So great did this difficulty appear 10 
Sir J. Herschel that he statéd to the British Association at ew- 
castle, that it appeared to him fatal to Mr. Espy’s theory. It ap- 
peared to Sir John that the only way to account for the fall of the 
barometer was a centrifugal force in the air, arising from the 
whirlwind character of storms. Mr. Espy thought it probable 
