1854.] A Twenty-third Memoir of the Law of Storms. 549 



might be partly the force of the wind below, (though as I have 

 before remarked, this is very incredible and improbable,) and partly 

 some uplifting power in the peculiar electric state of the atmos- 

 phere at the time, analogous to the attractions and repulsions of 

 light bodies between oppositely electrified conductors.* 



The set to the Westward over the Sand Heads. — This most danger- 

 ous set, it will be seen, was fully experienced in this Cyclone, and it 

 is so fraught with danger to the mariner that his attention cannot 

 be too closely directed to it. It becomes in fact at the approach of 

 a Cyclone, a complete Gulf Stream ! a term which every Atlantic 

 sailor perfectly understands. It is also, and this often as early as 

 the Barometer, and before the appearances of the sky and clouds 

 are at all remarkable, an almost infallible sign of the approach or 

 distant passage of a Cyclone ! 



CONCLUSION. 



I have had somewhere to say that almost every successive memoir 

 brings some new fact of importance to light, to reward us as it were 

 for our labour, in carefully collecting and following out the details. 

 And this, the Twenty-third of the series is no exception to the rule ; 

 for it discloses to us, not only a new track of which, though suspected, 

 we had as yet no instance, but it also offers us another proof that here 

 as in the China sea, the law of curving, or recurving, about the lati- 

 tude of the tropics at times holds good. Upon what this depends, 

 we are at present totally ignorant, and it is probably some effect of 

 those great laws of atmospheric agency by which Cyclones are 

 generated. Eor the present our task is to collect and register, and 

 to sum up our preliminary results, which never fail, as we see, of 

 affording us some practical advantage, and thus we may hope that 

 we are doubly advancing the cause of science by eliminating that 

 which is of present utility and by aiding in the research for general 

 laws when sufficient facts shall be collected to deduce them. 



* See Horn Book of Storms, 2nd edition, pp. 268 and 270 for instances of this 

 electrical effect in water-spouts, as also the log of the Brig Freak, Journ. As. So. 

 Vol. IX. page 1014. Third Memoir ; where the vessel's foremast is torn out of her, 

 carried up aloft, and falls down again on the deck ! 



