187 



we may not inappropriately claim a share in the general and 

 deeply felt regret occasioned by this event, by placing on our 

 records a brief tribute to the scientific- worth and manly excel- 

 lences which marked his career. 



Mr. Redfield, it is stated, was but little favored in early life 

 by opportunities of education. Even after his removal from his 

 native State, Connecticut, to tlie city of New York, while yet a 

 young man, he became immersed in business occupations such as 

 are commonly thought incompatible with purely intellectual pur- 

 suits, and which in most cases leave but little leisure and still 

 less disposition for the studies and investigations of science. But 

 his strong inclination for scientific inquiries was not to be re- 

 pressed by these discouragements, and he early enrolled himself 

 among the active students of Meteorology, Physical Geography, 

 and Geology. 



In the first of these departments, which it is well known was 

 the principal field of his investigations, his patience and sagacity 

 in observing facts, and in collating and compai'ing the observa- 

 tions made by others, bore their rich fruit in that remarkable 

 generalization which, under the title of the Rotary Theory of 

 Storms, is so commonly associated with his name. His earliest 

 recognition of this law appears to have been suggested by the 

 phenomena of the violent storm which, in the year 1821, swept 

 over New England ; and it is not a little remarkable that it was 

 a storm occurring the same year in Central Europe which led 

 the German Meteorologists into a similar train of inquiry, and 

 conducted Prof. Dove, of Berlin, to a theory founded like that of 

 Mr. Redfield on the union of a progressive with a rotary move- 

 ment of the disturbed column of air. 



It must not, however, be supposed that the fact of a revolving 

 motion in some of the more violent storms had hitherto entirely 

 escaped observation. Long before these systematic inquiries 

 were thought of, navigators had recognized such a movement in 

 some of the storms within the Tropics. As far back as 1G80, 

 Capt. Langford, in a paper on West Indian hurricanes, printed in 

 the Philosophical Transactions, described them as progressive 

 whirlwinds ; and at the beginning of the present century. Col. 

 Capper, Mr. Horsburg, and a French writer, Romme, speak of the 

 hurricanes or typhoons of the India and China seas as revolving 



