416 Proceedings of the JRoyal Society 
hurricanes. If he had, it is not too much to say that his profound 
penetration into Nature’s laws would scarcely have failed to recog- 
nise those which govern the mightiest of atmospherical movements. 
It is not likely, for example, that he would have left in a state of 
dry detail of bare facts the luminous description by Sir Gilbert 
Blane, communicated to the Society in 1785, of the terrible 
hurricane at Barbadoes in 1780 ; — -a description containing incidents 
which nothing but the modern theory of cyclones can explain, and 
which, duly considered, might have led so acute a mind as that of 
Hutton to the right solution, even at that early period. This storm 
lasted the greater part of two days, and raged with unexampled 
fury for twelve hours, destroying the fort at Bridgeton, levelling an 
immense number of houses, laying waste the whole crops of the 
island, and occasioning the sudden death of at least 3000 inhabi- 
tants. Notwithstanding, however, its uncommon swiftness, people 
were surprised at the comparative slowness with which it passed from 
island to island. They evidently confounded the impetuous whirl- 
wind within the C} r clone itself with the slower progress made by the 
whole cyclone from place to place. Ships at sea, adds Sir Gilbert, 
found that the storm blew from all points of the compass ; a 
phenomenon explicable only by the theory of the cyclone. The 
fate of one vessel is particularly mentioned as unaccountable ; 
for being blown from her anchorage in Carlisle Bay, and losing 
all her compasses, she was driven before the blast, as her crew 
supposed, to a distance of at least a hundred leagues in two 
days, when, to their astonishment, they found themselves very 
near the place from which they set out. There was enough in 
these striking facts to direct an acute and inquiring mind to a 
true theory of hurricanes, as now viewed by meteorologists. 
In the department of Thermometric Meteorology, Mr Hall of 
Whitehall records a precise fact as to the great cold of the 
winter of 1795, having observed the thermometer so low as — 6° F. 
on the 22d of January in that year. In order to appreciate duly 
the great intensity of this cold for a Scottish locality, it is neces- 
sary to know that the station where the observation was made 
is ten miles from the sea at Berwick, on the north bank of the 
Whittadder, certainly not more than 150 feet above high-water 
level. About this time the winters in Scotland were very hard. 
