Meteorological essays and observations / By. J. Frederic Daniell.

  • John Frederic Daniell
Date:
1827
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Meteorological essays and observations / By. J. Frederic Daniell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Now I conceive, that it will be no very difficult task to shew that the Professor has been as un- fortunate as his predecessors, in his proposed so- lution : and nothing can better illustrate the diffi- culty of the problem than such a failure. His er- ror, appears to me, to lie in the misapplication of the term horizontal^ in the first sentence of the above extract: as there applied, it is made to sig- nify rectilineal, contradistinguished to parallelism to the surface of the globe. Now what power can be supposed to produce such horizontality as this ? Mr. Leslie observes, that deflection from it is “ of the same nature as a centrifugal forcebut is it not obvious that it is itself a centrifugal force ? And then whence does such an impulse originate ? He has not revealed to us the manner in which he supposes the wind, which he employs, to arise, (and this alone is a defect in his theory ;) but upon no known principle, I conceive, can its tendency be tangental to the circumference of the earth. But, granting for a moment, the possibility of such a direction, let us suppose a current to begin to flow from A, in the direction of a tangent, and that it is bent from its rectilineal track at the point B by the action of gravity, how is the unknown force to be renewed, so that the wind at B is again to assume a tangental course ? But the hypothesis not only supposes this, but further, that it is infinitely re- newable ; and the effect which is at first scarcely perceptible, is “ accumulated by a long series of deflections.” When the foundations of a theory are, as I think, so palpably erroneous, it can scarcely be necessary
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