1885.] 
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ANALYSES OF BOOKS. 
The Winds : an Essay in Illustration of the Principles of Natural 
Philosophy. By W. Leighton Jordan, F.R.G.S. Third 
Edition. London : D. Bogue. 
Mr. Jordan is generally looked upon as a heretic in Science 
and as a “ vera troublesome person.” Like many such persons’ 
he has a habit of looking upon familiar phenomena from a novel 
point of view, and of calling for reasons which our official 
scientists are not always ready or willing to produce. 
The treatise before us forms the third and fourth chapters of a 
former work of the author’s, entitled “ The New Principles of 
Natuial Philosophy. One of its objects, as stated in the 
Dedication, is to show the connection between the Cartesian 
vortices and the Newtonian laws of gravitation. 
m ^r th 5° r ’ m his . first chapter, raises the question why the 
I rade Winds, sweeping along the Earth’s surface towards the 
Equator, do not take their rise in the Arctic regions, but are 
confined within the Torrid zone, from which an opposite current 
t le Anti- Trades— sets out, though with less regularity, and 
passes through the Temperate zones towards the Poles This 
feature has puzzled such authorities as Halley and Maury In 
deed the Anti-Trades are exactly the reverse of what the 
difference of temperature should produce. The author, to meet 
tins difficulty, maintams that the main agency is the gravitation 
of the Sun and Moon, and indeed, to a less extent, of all extra 
terrestrial bodies in conjunction with the centrifugal force of the 
Earth’s rotation. This rotation causes the winds to blow from 
an intermediate point, or rather from two intermediate points 
one in each hemisphere towards the Poles and towards the 
Equator. The reason why the Trades are more constant than 
the Anti-Trades lies in the heating addion of the Sun, which 
assists the former, but constantly tends to reverse the latter 
The “ lagging ” of the Trade Winds, and of the Moon in its 
orDit, accords with, or is not at variance with, the idea of its 
being due to “ the addion of a revolving force adding from some 
point between the centre and the surface of the Earth, and with 
a force inversely as the cube of the distance from that point.” 
The addion of a similar force about the Sun must, the author 
holds, be the cause of the onward movement of the planets in 
their orbits around the Sun. 
Astral gravitation, it is suggested, is transmuted into light by 
