A CHAPTER IN METEOROLOGICAL DISCOVERY. 



797 



of the very foremost of American physicists, put into execution a 

 plan long conceived and long agitated, securing a system of daily 

 observations throughout the United States and Canada. He first 

 arranged for daily reports by telegraph, and was the first to have 

 the atmospheric conditions over a large territory indicated on a 

 map. He paved the way for the systematic researches of that de- 

 partment of the public service which has since been organized as 

 the Weather Bureau, established in 1870, the most important work 

 in the interests of this science which has ever been undertaken. 

 For it is now possible to put in the hands of a few trained 

 minds at Washington, three times in every day, an amount of 

 data many times more than all that Redfield or Espy or Hare 

 collected in years of study. It is to the efforts of Dr. Henry, fol- 

 lowing upon the patient research of the men whose work we have 

 thus slightly traced, that we owe the rise and growth of the 

 science as it stands to-day. An army of observers, drilled to the 

 greatest precision of scrutiny, on land and on sea, on hill-tops and 

 in the valleys, in every latitude from the ecpiator to the polar 

 circle, scans the heavens and watches the earth for every mete- 

 orological change. The charting of great storms, the making of 

 forecasts, the posting of storm-warnings, all indicate the condi- 

 tion which this science has slowly attained, through the combined 

 and cumulative labors of so many patient observers. From the 

 conjecture of Benjamin Franklin, about the northeast storms be- 

 ginning to leeward, to the splendid system by which the move- 

 ments of a great storm are announced and described almost as 

 regularly and clearly as the movements of trains on a railway sys- 

 tem is a long advance. It is an advance which shows how much 

 we have to be proud of in this great national work, as it has 

 grown and developed at the hands of our own countrymen. It 

 illustrates, moreover, the fact that in the researches of science, as 

 in all the labors of humanity, every man's work tells, and enters 

 into the great result. Patient toil concentrated upon chosen sub- 

 jects never fails to yield its due results, valuable for all men. 

 Even the most abstruse scientific research may have, nay, will 

 surely have, its issue in practical good to men ; and the most retir- 

 ing and isolated student in his solitary studies is as true a ser- 

 vant of his kind as he who sows and reaps acres of wheat, or 

 weaves the cloth that clothes men's bodies. When William C. 

 Redfield was gathering the facts about his Three Great Atlantic 

 Storms, he was doing as direct a service to the future shippers 

 and navigators of the Atlantic coast, and the cotton-growers of 

 Georgia and Alabama, as if he had furnished cargoes for their 

 ships or markets for their cargoes. 



VOL. XLI. 58 



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