74 Notices of Tornadoes^ ^c. 



fruit trees or poultry : nor were human beings secure from being 

 carried aloft, and more or less injured by subsequent descent. It 

 was alledged that at Somerset two women were carried from a 

 wagon over a wall, into an adjoining field. Within the same 

 village a cellar door frame, with its doors bolted, was lifted, and 

 then deposited on one side of its previous position ; although sit- 

 uated to windward of the mansion to which it belonged. This 

 result was the more striking, because, in consequence of their pre- 

 senting an inclined plane to the blast, the doors and their frames 

 would have been pressed more firmly upon their foundation by 

 an ordinary wind. In consequence of the same dilatation of the 

 air within the house, which lifted the cellar door, the weather- 

 boarding on the leeward side was burst open, while that to the 

 windward was undisturbed. 



About four o'clock on the afternoon during which this tornado 

 passed near Providence, there was heard at the farm at which I 

 resided, twenty-five miles south of Providence and about fifteen 

 miles from Somerset, the loudest thunder which I ever experien- 

 ced. It made the house in which I was tremble sensibly. 



I have received from an estimable friend, Mr. Allen, a most in- 

 teresting account of this tornado, which passed over the river, 

 and there produced the appearance of a water-spout, while he 

 was sufficiently near for accurate observation. In one respect his 

 narrative tends to justify my opinion, that the exciting cause of 

 tornadoes is electrical attraction. In two instances in which 

 flashes of lightning proceeded from the water, Mr. Allen remarked 

 that the eifervescence produced by the tornado in the water very 

 perceptibly subsided.* 



Extract from a Letter written hy Zachariah Allen, Esq., of 



Providence. 



" It was about three o'clock, P. M., during a violent shower, 

 that I observed a peculiarly black cloud to form in the midst of 

 light, fleecy clouds, and to assume a portentous appearance in the 

 heavens, having a long, dark, tapering cone of vapor extending 

 from it to the surface of the earth. The form of this black cloud, 

 and of the cone of vapor depending from it, so nearly resembled 



* See Essay on the Cause of Tornadoes or Water-spouts in sixth vol. American 

 Philosophical Transactions, or in Silliman's Journal, vol. 32, for 1837. 



