792 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



This was certainly a very important series of conclusions, 

 and it establishes certain principles or laws in regard to a certain 

 class of North American storms beyond cavil. Redfield had thus 

 shown that many at least of the great storms which traverse the 

 Atlantic coast come from the tropics east of the West Indies and 

 describe a great parabola in their course; that the direction of 

 the wind in these storms was entirely a distinct matter from the 

 direction in which the storm is moving ; and that this storm is 

 a system of winds, blowing whirlwind-fashion about a central 

 point, in a direction contrary to that of the hands of a watch. 

 That is the substance of Redfield's discovery ; and it is one of 

 the most important contributions ever made to the science of 

 storms, not alone in its purely scientific relations, but also, as we 

 shall see, in a most practical way in the service of mariners. 



Just here we touch an interesting episode of Redfield's career, 

 in his connection with Sir William Reid, an English engineer- 

 colonel at Barbadoes, himself deeply interested in this subject, and 

 an investigator of the law of storms in general. Redfield and Reid 

 entered into a correspondence upon the subject which lasted for 

 twenty years, and which Redfield declares was most serviceable 

 to him. But, as Colonel Reid's earliest inquiries were based on a 

 storm of 1831, ten years later than the one which gave Redfield 

 his first hint of a theory, it may still be maintained that Red- 

 field was the first to grasp the new facts in all their meaning. 

 He acknowledges an indebtedness to Colonel Reid as well as 

 to Piddington, in his essay on " Asiatic Storms." But their work 

 could have done little more for him than to confirm his own 

 thought and guide his investigations. It remained for this early 

 student of these phenomena to follow the great storms of the 

 Atlantic from their breeding-place near the " doldrums/' in their 

 curving path through the Gulf of Mexico and along the United 

 States coast, proving that these vast hurricanes of the West 

 Indies are progressive storms, moving westward till central in 

 the Gulf and then recurving toward the northeast, retaining 

 their essential characteristics, though somewhat less violent than 

 in their beginnings. This was the scope of Redfield's investiga- 

 tions. He indicated the track of one entire class of American 

 storms, and showed them to be great circular movements of the 

 air, like immense whirlwinds or cyclones, traveling bodily over 

 wide areas. 



A word more ought to be said before we pass from the work 

 of Redfield, as to his theory of the direction of the winds about 

 the center of a cyclone, a point much debated since his day, 

 and in which he was singularly correct in his judgment. At 

 the time he made his investigations, everybody supposed that 

 these great storms were disturbances in which the winds blew 



