the earth_. Colonel Reid has much to say about the "_storm's eye_," or
"treacherous center" of a storm. A careful analysis of the instances where
the "storm's eye" is noticed will show that the term is applied, in the
northern hemisphere, to that lighting up in the W. or N. W., which is the
commencement of the clearing-off process, and attended with a shift of
wind to the fair-weather quarter: _i. e._, to W. or N. W. Just such an
"eye" as is seen when the last of the storm cloud has passed so far to the
east as to admit the rays of the sun under the western or north-western
edge of it. The same kind of "storm's eye" is described in the southern
hemisphere, except that the wind shifts to S. W. instead of N. W., that
being the clearing-off wind there. No instance of a "_storm's eye_" in
the center of the extended stratum of stratus-cloud, which overlies the
storm, can be found recorded, to my knowledge; and it is obvious that
Colonel Reid adopts the view of Mr. Redfield, that the westerly and N. W.
_fair weather_ winds are a part of the storm. So long as these gentlemen
hold to that opinion they will never solve the question, "_what are
storms?_" or reach the other, "_how are storms produced?_"

Notwithstanding, Mr. Redfield asserts, or adopts the assertion, that the
inquiry should be, "What are storms?" not "How are storms produced?" that
inquiry should be a _rational_ one, and should not violate all analogy, or
call for an explanation which science can not _rationally_ furnish. Mr.
Redfield does not seem to have formed any just conception of the
_immeasurable power_ of a hurricane, _five hundred miles in diameter_; or
of the nature of that _rod_ which the _Almighty must insert in it, to
whirl it with such violent and long-continued force_; nor any just
conception of the tendency of the whirling mass, in the absence of his
"cylindrical vessel," to fly off, tangentially, into the surrounding air;
or of the nature or power of the centripetal force necessary to hold the
gyratory mass in its current, and gather it in involute spirals toward a
center. Nor has any other man who has witnessed, or read of
mountain-tossed waves; of the largest ships blown down and engulfed; of
towns submerged, and vessels carried far inland, and left in cultivated
fields, by the subsidence of the sea; of sturdy forests and strongly-built
edifices prostrated; or listened to the howling of the tempest, and felt
his own house rock beneath him, been