A CHAPTER IN METEOROLOGICAL DISCOVERY. 789 



observed the accounts of newspapers from New England, New 

 York, Maryland, Virginia, and South. Carolina, and I find it to be 

 a constant fact that the northeast storms begin to leeward, and 

 are often more violent there than to windward." 



Those letters are probably the earliest literature on the sub- 

 ject of North American storms, the first documents of scientific 

 value in the long series of observations and of studies which have 

 brought us to our present valuable knowledge. Undoubtedly, 

 this fact, which had suggested itself to Franklin, had been ob- 

 served before by fishermen, by mariners, and others, accustomed 

 to the practical observation of the weather. But this is the ini- 

 tial point of its treatment as a scientific phenomenon. Between 

 the two kinds of observation there is a world-wide difference. 

 The observer is not always nor often the seer. There are a hun- 

 dred thousand who can note a fact for one who can draw an in- 

 ference from it. A good many myriads of generations had noted 

 the ebb and flow of the tides before anybody noted a connection 

 between these facts and the daily passage of the moon across the 

 meridian. It is likely that a good many fishermen and sailors 

 and captains had talked over the curious fact that the first signs 

 of the coming northeaster seemed to be from the leeward of its 

 characteristic wind. Perhaps some of these unscientific folk had 

 propounded their crude theories about the motions of storms to 

 the little knots of comrades about the cabin fire or under the 

 forecastle's dim lantern. But, being unscientific people, they did 

 not know how to gather and marshal their facts, draw their 

 inferences, and declare their hypotheses. And so Dr. Franklin 

 must have the credit of first propounding this doctrine about 

 American storms. Many years elapsed before his became the ac- 

 cepted view, and people understood that the easterly storms of 

 New England, and indeed of the whole country, were travelers 

 from west to east, and not visitants from the sea, drifting up the 

 coasts and inland. The lack of facilities for observation, the 

 dearth of data, the infrequency of communication, the almost 

 utter neglect of the phenomena whose study in recent years has 

 founded the science of meteorology, were all conditions which 

 greatly retarded the knowledge of meteorology in our own coun- 

 try, and made it impossible to trace the connection of weather in 

 one region with that in others. 



William C. Redfield. The serious and consecutive study 

 of the motions of North American storms may be said to have 

 begun with the investigations of William C. Redfield, one of the 

 most painstaking, broad-minded, and sagacious of American scien- 

 tists. So competent an authority as Commodore Maury has called 

 him " the Kepler of storm physics." Prof. Denison Olmstead, of 

 Yale College, in a brief memoir published in the American Jour- 



VOL. XLI. 57 



