REMARKS ON THE LAW OF STORMS. 297 
of two different tempests. It appeared like a prodigious smoke roll- 
ing from a limekiln. It landed about 9 p.m., its course being nearly 
from S. b. W. to N. b. E. Length of its track twelve miles, which it 
passed over in twenty minutes; and seventy rods may be taken for the 
mean diameter of its vertiginous motion.”’ 
“The duration of the offensive wind could not exceed twenty 
seconds. The direct velocity of the storm is forty-two feet in a 
second, to which adding forty-three feet, for the increase by the ver- 
tiginous or spiral motion, makes eighty-five feet, which is the space 
run through in every second of time near the outward verge of the 
gyration, and the velocity by which all obstacles received the impulse 
of the wind.” 
Budgen alludes to the “storm’s eye’’—the H/ ojo of the Spanish 
mariners—often noticed since.* “At Ewhurst a brightness was 
observed in the clouds approaching about the breadth that afterwards 
appeared to have been taken in by the hurricane, and such a strong 
light during the time of the greatest violence of the storm, as far 
exceeded any of the preceding flashes of lightning.” 
Again, he observes :—“‘ By passing thro’ and between buildings, 
touching both sides, and by the circular lanes in some places, in wood- 
lands that were full of timber, and by some particular buildings rent 
m divers parts by impulses of several directions, undeniably proves 
that the swift vertigmous motion of hurricanes is not owing to any 
force equally impressed upon the fluid in motion, according to, and 
as they are commonly compared to, liquid whirlpools, &c., but rather 
that the offensive part of the fluid, which moves with such violence as 
scarcely to be resisted, appears to have taken in not more than ,},th 
or 3th of the diameter of the whirlwind or fluid in a vertiginous 
motion, for where it raged with the greatest violence in the thickets 
of timber some trees had not the least appearance of a storm, yet all 
the trees about them were torn up by the roots and shattered into 
splinters.”’ 
Again :—‘‘ That its motion was contra-solem, or from the right 
hand to the left, was plain from all bodies being drove down near the 
eastern verge towards the north, and near the western towards the 
south. By increasing in breadth as it ascended to the tops of the 
* “ A very remarkable fact is that while all around the horizon was a thick dark bank of 
clouds, the sky above was so perfectly clear that the stars were seen.”—Reid on the Law of: 
Storms, p. 398, &c. 
Vou. V. x 
