380 P. E. Chase on Barometric Fluctuations. 
turbance and the same stormy culmination. 
[My attention has been called by the Journal of the Franklin 
Institute, to some extracts from the London Atheneum for Janu- 
ary, announcing a paper on Magnetic Storms, which was read 
by Mr. Airy before the Royal Society, in which the Astronomer 
Royal appears, in some measure, to have anticipated my views 
upon the sources of terrestrial magnetism. 
As I have not yet seen the paper in question, I do not know 
how far the priority may extend; whatever may be its limits, 
will give me pleasure to yield my claims to so distinguished an 
cautious an investigator, and to find that my own independent 
conclusions have been so ably corroborated. And I believe I 
have good grounds for hoping that in the specific solar action 
which I have pointed out, Mr. Airy will find the precise ““occa- 
sional currents produced by some action or cessation of action 
of the sun,” for which he is looking.] 
Arr. XXXVIII.—On the Principal Causes of Barometric Fluctu- 
ations ;* by Puivy Eagiz Cuass, M.A., 8.P.A.S. 
THE powerful and prejudicial influence of an inveterate sci- 
entific error, is shown in the following dogmatical statement 7 
Mr. Joseph John Murphy, an investigator who has lent usef 
aid to meteorological science.’ : 
In the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal for April, 1864, 
p. 183, he says; ‘‘ Were the atmosphere not acted on by heat, 1 
would be everywhere at rest, and every level surface, at ara 
ever height, would be an isobarometric surface. .... The earths 
? From the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. me 
Mr. Murphy was an early and independent adcheti of so much of Mr. Wities 
explains the polar depression of the barometer by centrifuge 
ction. Mr. Ferrel’s paper, which appears to have been the first publi- 
t ined a true explanation of the equatorial as well as the polar bare” 
form, in the summer of 1856. 3 4: 
: at greater in his essay on “the motion of fluids and solids ge 
to the earth's surface,” which was published in the Mathematical Monthly 
‘vol. i, p. 140, sqq. 
