STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 413 



ward in summer and southward in winter. But they do not illustrate the 

 abnormal variations in its position, due to, we know not what, though we do 

 know that the storms of America and Europe are guided by it, and the next 

 great step in advance will be to turn this knowledge to practical account 

 in our forecast of weather on the North Atlantic, and along its eastern and 

 western shores. 



In addition, then, to those permanent areas of high and low barometers, 

 eddies or atmospheric whirls move along pretty well defined tracks, as 

 indicated on the diagram; cyclones, or "lows" (in ordinary parlance, 

 storms), sucking the air spirally inward and whirling it aloft, its moisture 

 condensing into heavy clouds, with rain or snow; anti-cyclones, or " highs," 

 returning the cool, dry air to the surface in outward blowing spirals, with 

 cool dry weather and high barometer. The two storm tracks of spiral 

 interest in this connection are: first, the Great Lake storm track, from west 

 to east over the Great Lakes and down the St. Lawrence Valley; and, 

 secondly, the West Indian hurricane track, westward in the tropics, then 

 northward into the temperate zone, and eastward again in higher latitudes. 

 Cyclonic eddies tend to move toward and unite with the permanent " low " 

 near Ireland; anti-cyclonic, with the permanent anti-cyclone in mid-ocean. 

 Upon these general laws, together with local modifications due to topo- 

 graphic relief ashore and the influence of the great ocean currents at sea, 

 hang all the weather changes of the North Atlantic basin. 



After this general view the lecturer said that he proposed to confine his 

 attention to the western portion of the ocean, that portion which an emi- 

 nent American scientist has well called the " Bay of North America." This 

 term embraces all of the Atlantic west of the fiftieth meridian, from New- 

 foundland to the mouths of the Amazon, including the Caribbean Sea and 

 the Gulf of Mexico. He did not propose, he said, to leave to a postscript 

 what he himself regarded as by far the most important point that any 

 thorough study of West Indian hurricanes and the March blizzard could 

 possibly emphasize, namely, the tremendous commercial importance of 

 this great Bay of North America. The area from the fiftieth to the one 

 hundredth meridian west of Greenwich, and from the equator to the fiftieth 

 parallel of north latitude, is destined to become, in the near future, the 

 theater of the greatest political and commercial activity that the world has 

 ever seen. Meteorologically speaking, it is a unit from the slopes of the 

 Rockies and the Cordilleras of the Isthmus to mid-ocean, and from the 

 shores of the Hudson Bay to Venezuela. Abercromby, the distinguished 

 English meteorologist, has well said that the weather predictor " cannot 

 explain the weather on any day without casting his eyes over the whole 

 northern hemisphere and around the little hills and valleys which bound 

 his own horizon." Urging his hearers to bear this in mind during his sub- 

 sequent remarks, and promising to refer to the subject again, he went on 

 to describe Redfield's great discoveries, the methods by which his results 

 were obtained, and their immediate and practical effect in advancing 

 meteorological knowledge and lessening the dangers of ocean storms. 



Although it is now generally recognized that Redfield had reached his 

 fundamental conclusions regarding the rotary character of storms, together 

 with a motion of the whole system along a definite track, as early as 1821, 

 yet his first paper did not appear in print till 1831, and was even then un- 

 accompanied by the diagrams so necessary in the then state of knowledge, 

 or rather ignorance, of the subject. Nevertheless, most of his earliest papers 

 were accompanied by such full statements of methods and facts that any 

 one could plot the observations on a chart and thus verify his conclusions 

 for himself. To illustrate his method, therefore, Mr. Hayden selected one 



