Trains of Boulders, in Berkshire, Mass. 395 
the atmosphere is more notorious than that the uprooting and 
far-scattering tempest of the tropics has an excessive gyratory 
momentum at its centre; by which it actually lifts and bears 
away the most ponderous and bulky objects, even trees, beams, 
animals, and houses. It is equally well known that its path is 
linear and very narrow, the upborne fragments being strewn 
along, dropped out, as it were, from the apex of the whirling 
funnel. Precisely the same lifting and carrying action is seen 
in the mimic funnels which we make experimentally in a 
shallow sheet of water, or behold in almost any rapid brook. 
That the particles in the whirlwind or waterspout, and, by 
analogy, in the whirlpool, rotate, round the axis of the vortex, 
in ascending and widening spirals, is a fact expressly men- 
tioned by all who have been presented with opportunities for 
observation. This spiral motion in a waterspout was per- 
ceived by Captain Beechey near Clermont-Tonnerre, and was 
distinctly seen, in another near Bermuda, by Governor Reid, 
who, in his valuable Treatise on the Law of Storms, speaks 
of his having beheld the phenomenon through a telescope. 
lt has been established beyond all controversy by Mr. Red- 
field, who has cited some very interesting details to show that 
à rapid ascending whirl is producible artificially, when a large 
mass of combustible matter, such as brushwood, is set blazing, 
in a calm day, in an open field. The upward whirling column, 
thus caused, extended, in one instance, to a prodigious height, 
and had a swiftness which the beholder describes as exceeding 
all his previous conceptions of the velocity of wind. Nearly 
every reader of travels is familiar with Bruce’s glowing descrip- 
tion of the tall pillars of sand which he encountered in his 
traverse of the Nubian Desert— their tops reaching to the 
very clouds, while their diameters, at the ground, scarcely 
exceeded a few feet, and stalking over the vast plain with 
majestic slowness, or chasing each other with the speed of the 
Swiftest horse. These were evidently the same phenomenon 
as the Waterspout, possessing the same enormous upward 
| power. The elevating and transporting energy of 
