Cyclones. 331 



papers by the late Admiral Fitzroy, are contained in his excellent 

 work^ the Weather-Booh, from which many details in this 

 article have been unavoidably and exclusively borrowed, 



The first description of a great storm in England, after that 

 of the great Armada in 1588, pretending to scientific accuracy, 

 was written by De Foe, the celebrated author of Robinson 

 Crusoe, The Plague of London, etc., entitled, The Great Storm 

 of November, 1703. Many accounts of this storm appear 

 in contemporary numbers of the Philosophical Transactions. 

 The wooden lighthouse erected by Winstanley on the 

 dangerous Eddystone Rock, near the coast of Cornwall, 

 disappeared, while undergoing some repairs, in this storm, on 

 the 26th of November 1703, and Winstanley, and all his 

 assistants, thirty in number, perished in the sea. That actual 

 hurricanes occasionally visit the British Islands there is reason, 

 from the description of this storm, to believe. It will further- 

 more be seen, by what follows, that very destructive storms 

 visited England at an interval of only a few years, in 1859 

 and 1863. 



Lord Francis Bacon, and later, Dr. Halley, attempted very 

 early to give a scientific explanation of the trade winds. Yet 

 it was not until the year 1735 that Hadley described, in the 

 Philosophical Transactions, the real origin of the trades. The 

 law of storms, or theory of cyclones, is of still more recent 

 date, and the subject of the variable winds appears first to 

 have engaged the attention of Dr. Franklin in America about 

 the year 1740. The following occurrence is narrated by him- 

 self, in a letter addressed to Mr. Alexander Small, under the 

 date of May 12, 1760, printed in Colonel Capper's work on 

 Winds and Monsoons. " About twenty years ago," Franklin 

 writes, " we were to have an eclipse of the moon at Phila- 

 delphia, about nine o'clock. I intended to have observed it, 

 but was prevented by a north-east storm, which came on 

 about seven, with thick clouds as usual, that quite obscured the 

 whole hemisphere ; yet, when the post brought us the Boston 

 newspaper, giving us an account of the same storm in those 

 parts, I found the beginning of the eclipse had been well 

 observed there, though Boston is north-east of Philadelphia 

 about 400 miles. This puzzled me ; because the storm began 

 so soon with us, as to prevent any observation ; and being a 

 north-east storm, I imagined it must have begun rather sooner 

 further to the north-eastward than it did at Philadelphia ; but 

 I found that it did not begin with them until near eleven o'clock, 

 so that they had a good observation of the eclipse. And upon 

 comparing all other accounts which I received from the other 

 colonies, of the time of beginning of the same storm, aud 

 since that of other storms of the same kind, I found the 



