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Memoir of William C. Redfield, 361 



supcrioritj of railroads to canals, advantages which, although 

 then contemplated only in theory, have been fully established 

 by subsequent experience. He had even anticipated that after 

 the construction of the proposed great trunk railway connecting 

 the Hudson and the Mississippi, many lateral railways and canals 

 would be built, which would bind in one vast net-work the 

 whole great west to the Atlantic states. "This great plateau 

 (says he) will indeed one day be intersected by thousands of 

 miles of railroad communications; and so rapid will be the in- 

 crease of its population and resources, that many persons now 

 living will probably see most or all of this accomplished." How 

 truly has this remarkable prediction, uttered in 1829, when there 

 was not a foot of railroad in all the country under review, been 

 fulfilled! 



The motives which impelled Mr. Redfield to spread this sub- 

 ject before, the American people at that early day, when rail- 

 roads were scarcely known in this country, were purely patriotic. 

 He had no private interests to subserve in the proposed enter- 

 prize, and the whole expense of preparing and publishing two 

 editions of the pamphlet embodying these enlarged and pro- 

 phetic views, was defrayed from his own limited resources. 



In 1832, Mr. Redfield again issued a pamphlet, setting forth 

 the importance of a railway leading from New York to Albany. 

 This was no less evincive than the other of his public spirit and 

 disinterestedness, since his private interests lay in the steamboat 

 iiavigation of the Hudson, to which the proposed railway would 

 be a powerful rival. 



But we turn from these noble enterprises in which the philoso- 

 plier and the engineer were happily united in the same individual, 

 to the consideration of the great subject which, from this time, 

 formed the leading object of his life, namely, to perfect his theory 

 o/ storms. Nor do we turn away from great practical subjects 

 to such as are merely speculative. The lives and property which 

 Redfield's disinterested labors in behalf of steam navigation 

 contributed to save, would, we believe, be of small amount com- 

 pared Avith the sailors and ships which the rules founded on his 

 theory of storms, when fully applied to practice, will save from 



shipwreck. 



We have already seen that the attention of Mr. Redfield was 

 first drawn to the Subject of storms in the year 1821, by exam- 

 ining the position of trees prostrated by the great September 

 gale, which passed over Connecticut and the western part of 

 Massachusetts that year. Although he had never lost si^ht of 

 tbe theory of storms, yet the multiflirioua business concerns 

 ^'hich engrossed the greater pnrt of his time for a number of years 

 afterwards, prevented his bringing it distinctly before the public 

 ^ntil the year 1831. I chanced at that period to meet him for 



SECOND SERIES, VOL. XXIV, NO, 7^. — NOV., 1857. 



46 



