544 



war, he took part, while yet a subaltern, in the sieges of Ciudad 

 Rodrigo, Burgos, and St. Sebastian, in each of which he was wounded, 

 and in the battles of Salamanca, Vittoria, Nivelle, Nive, and Tou- 

 louse. He did not obtain his Captaincy until 1814. He was pre- 

 sent at the bombardment of Algiers under Lord Exmouth in 1816 ; 

 and he took an active part, twenty years later, in the operations of 

 Sir de Lacy Evans in Spain, where he commanded the Engineers of 

 the British auxiliary force. 



Ever ready, however, as he was, to follow the leadings of his own 

 profession, his active mind was not less alive to its scientific interests. 

 He was the contributor of nine papers to the * Professional Papers ' 

 of the Royal Engineers, usually on technical subjects ; but some- 

 times on subjects, such as the movement of the shingle along our 

 coasts, which are more nearly related to his favourite studies. It 

 was in 1832 that his mind first received the bias which he afterwards 

 followed with so much distinction and success. It fell to his lot, 

 as the officer of Engineers at Barbadoes, to have to re-establish the 

 Government buildings blown down in the hurricane of the 1 Oth of 

 August, 1831 : no less than 1477 persons out of a population of 

 about 130,000 lost their lives on that occasion, and property to the 

 value of more than 1,6 00, 000 was destroyed. The devastation and 

 misery he witnessed, led him, in his own words, " to search every- 

 where for accounts of previous storms, in the hope of learning 

 something of their causes and mode of action." In this he was 

 materially assisted by the previous labours of Mr. Redfield of New 

 York, who, as early as 1831, had published in the ' American Journal 

 of Science' the first of a numerous series of papers in which he 

 demonstrated, not only that the storms of the American coast were 

 whirlwinds, in opposition to high authorities, who maintained that the 

 direction of the wind is rectilinear, but also traced some of them from 

 the West Indies to the sea-board of the United States, and proved 

 that they were progressive whirlwinds, moving forward on curved 

 tracks with a considerable velocity. Fully acknowledging his obliga- 

 tions to this great meteorologist, Lieut. -Colonel Reid set himself to 

 confirm and extend his deductions, by a laborious collation of the 

 log-books of British men-of-war and merchantmen. Impressed also 

 with the idea that to the south of the equator, " in accordance with 

 the regularity nature follows in all her laws, storms would be found 

 to move in a directly contrary direction," he endeavoured to collect 



