124 



" His hypothesis was, I conceive, unsatisfactory, because it did 

 not assign any cause for the concentration of the wind, or for the 

 hiatus presumed to he the cause. This deficiency is supplied, if my 

 suggestions he correct.'''' 



On reading this passage, after previously hearing or reading the 

 allegation above quoted, that Dr. Hare's hypothesis was defective 

 in not appealing to a gyratory movement, it was presumed that it 

 would be perfectly evident to every one, that, from ignorance of Eng- 

 lish, or inattention, Mr. Peltier's statement was the reverse of the re- 

 ality. 



In proof of a gyratory force having been exercised during the New 

 Brunswick tornado, Dr. Hare referred to his having, in his Memoir, 

 cited the case of a chimney, of which the upper portion had been so 

 twisted upon the lower portion, as to have its corners projecting 

 over the sides of the latter ; but he had now taken a different view of 

 that fact, which had since struck him as being of much higher impor- 

 tance than he had formerly considered it. 



During an examination of the track of the tornado which lately 

 ravaged the suburbs of New Haven, Dr. Hare had been led to infer 

 that the electrical discharge is concentrated upon particular bodies, 

 according to their character, or the conducting nature of the soil; so 

 that the vertical force arising from electrical reaction, and the elasti- 

 city of the air, acts upon them with peculiar force. Hence, while 

 some trees were borne aloft, others, which were situated very near 

 them, on either side, remained rooted in the soil. In two instances 

 at New Haven, wagons were especially the victims of the electro- 

 aerial conflict. In the case of one of these, the axletree was broken, 

 and while one wheel was carried into an adjoining field, the other 

 was driven with so much force against the weather-boarding of a 

 barn, as to leave both a mark of the projecting hub, and of the greater 

 portion of the periphery. The plates of the elliptical springs were se- 

 parated from each other. During the tornado at New Brunswick, 

 the injury done to some wagons in the shop of a coach-maker, ap- 

 peared, at the time, inexplicable. Tt was now inferred, that the four 

 iron wheel tires, caused, by their immense conducting power, a con- 

 fluence of the electric fluid, producing a transient explosive rarefaction, 

 and a subsequent afflux of air with a local gyration of extreme vio- 

 lence. 



It may be reasonably surmised, that the excessive injury done to 

 trees results, not from the general whirl, but from a local gyration to 



