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pursuing their investigations, and generalizing observed facts in order to clear up the mystery and discover the laws by which these storms are governed up to the time I have mentioned.
In the year 1698 Captain Langford in a paper on the West Indian Hurricanes (Philosophical Transactions for 1698) describes the veering of the wind and calls it a whirlwind, speaks of a progressive motion and gives it some limits but nothing more.
In the year 1743 a Spanish navigator Don Juan De Ulloa describes a storm on the Pacific Coast of South America, in which description he speaks of the veering and sudden shifting of the wind, but does not seem to have conceived the idea of a whirlwind or rotatory storm.
Colonel Capper—in speaking of the Madras and Coromandel Coast hurricanes—says, in a work published in 1801 after describing these storms:—“All these circumstances properly considered clearly manifest the nature of these winds, or rather positively prove them to be whirlwinds whose diameter cannot be more than 120 miles, and the vortex seems generally near Madras or Pulicat;” and again after describing some on the Malabar Coast, and in the Southern Indian Ocean he says:—“Thus then it appears that these tempests or hurricanes are tornadoes or local whirwinds, and are felt with at least equal violence on the Coast and some little distance out at sea.”
A French author named Romme in a work published in 1806, describes a storm in the China sea near the Gulf of Tonkin, which he distinctly calls a whirlwind, and applies the same name to other storms experienced in the Mozambique Channel, and again others in the Gulf of Mexico.
Professor Farrar of the Cambridge University, New England, in describing a storm that passed over Boston in 1815 says that he could not determine the centre or limits, but noticed the veering of the wind and the fact of it having veered in opposite directions at Boston and New York at the same time. Also the difference of time be-
