MAGNETISM AND CIRCULATION OF THE ATMOSPHERE. 121 
these polar calms by a circular or spiral motion, traveling in the 
northern hemisphere against, and in the southern loitli the hands 
of a watch. The circular gales of the northern hemisphere are 
said also to revolve in like manner against the hands of a watch, 
while those in the southern hemisphere travel the other way. 
Now, should not this discovery of these three poles, this coinci- 
dence of revolving winds, with the other circumstances that have 
been brought to light, encourage us to look to the magnetism of 
the air for the key to these mysterious but striking coincidences ? 
Indeed, so wide for speculation is the field presented by these 
discoveries, that we may in some respects regard this great globe 
itself, with its " cups" and spiral wires of air, earth, and water, as 
an immense "pile" and helix, w^hich, being excited by the natural 
batteries in the sea and atmosphere of the tropics, excites in turn 
its oxygen, and imparts to atmospherical matter the properties of 
magnetism. 
225. With the lights which these discoveries cast, we see (Plate 
I.) why air, which has completed its circuit to the whirl* about the 
Antarctic regions, should then, according to the laws of magnet- 
ism, be repelled from the south, and attracted by the opposite pole 
toward the north. 
And when the southeast and the northeast trade-winds meet in 
the equatorial calms of the Pacific, vi^ould not these magnetic 
forces be sufficient to determine the course of each current, bring- 
ing the former, with its vapors of the southern hemisphere, over 
into this, by the courses already suggested ? 
226. This force and the heat of the sun would propel it to the 
north. The diurnal rotation of the earth propels it to the east ; 
consequently, its course, first through the upper regions of the 
atmosphere, and then on the surface of the earth, after being 
conducted by this newly-discovered agent across the calms of 
Cancer, would he from the southward and westward to the north- 
ward and eastward. 
These are the winds 122) which, on their way to the north 
from the South Pacific, would pass over the Mississippi Valley, 
and they appear 214) to be the rain winds there. Whence, then, 
if not from the trade-wind regions of the South Pacific, can the 
vapors for those rains come ? 
* " It whirleth about continually." — Bihle. 
