A remarkable phenomenon was exhibited by a hurricane in 1837, and described by Capt. Seymour of Cork. "For nearly an hour we could not see each other nor anything else, but merely the light, and most astonishing, every one of our finger-nails turned quite black and remained so nearly five weeks afterwards. This fact may be classed among other proofs of the agency of electricity in the production of hurricanes."
The following facts are entirely inconsistent with usual methods of explanation of the cause of winds: "The entire atmosphere, to the altitude of many thousand feet, is constantly traversed by numerous horizontal currents of air, flowing in different directions and at different heights."
The course of a balloonist was altered no less than five times in the space of fourteen hours. "The aëronaut Green, at the height of 14,000 feet, encountered a current that bore him along at the rate of five miles per hour, but upon descending to the altitude of 12,000 feet he met a contrary wind blowing with a velocity of eighty miles an hour."
The vito-magnetic fluid is capable of becoming amassed, condensed and rarefied. In the tornado that happened at Natchez, in 1840, the houses exploded whenever the doors and windows were shut, the roofs shooting up into the air, and the walls even of the strongest buildings bursting outward with great force.
On the 18th of June, 1839, a whirlwind fell upon the village of Chatenay, near Paris. In the room of a house over which it passed, several articles of needle-work were lying upon a table. The next day some of them were found in a field at a distance from the house, together with a pillow-case taken from another room. They must have been carried up the chimney by the rush of air outwards, as every other means of exit was closed.
It is a fact well-known to miners that during and before violent tempests, strong ascending currents are observed.
Pl. IV. MANUFACTURED WIND.