430 Biographical Memoir oj William C. Redjield. 



desire of intellectual progress. Yet every year added largely to 

 his scientific acquisitions, and developed more fully his intellectual 

 and moral energies. Meanwhile his active mind left its impress 

 on the quiet community where he lived, in devising and carrying 

 out various plans for advancing their social comfort and respecta- 

 bility, in the improvement and embelishment of their streets, 

 school houses and churches, and in promoting the interests of the 

 literary club, from which he himself, in early youth, had derived 

 such signal advantages. From deep domestic trials which aflflict- 

 ed him about the year 1820, he bad recourse for solace both to 

 the word and the works of God. It was soon after one of the 

 severest of these trials, that his attention was first directed to the 

 subject of Atlantic Gales. 



On the 3rd of September, 1821, there occurred, in the eastern 

 part of Conne(;ticut, one of the most violent storms ever known 

 there, and long remembered as the "great September Gale." 

 Shortly after this, Mr. Redfield being on a journey to the western 

 part of Massachusetts, happened to travel over a region covered 

 by marks of the ravages of the recent storm. He was accompa- 

 nied by his eldest son, tlien a young lad, who well remembers 

 these early observations of his father, and the inference he drew 

 from them. At Middletown, the place of Mr. Redfield's residence, 

 the gale commenced from the southeast, prostrating the trees 

 towards the northwest ; but on reaching the northwestern part of 

 Connecticut, and the neighboring parts of Massachussetts, he was 

 surprised to find that there the trees lay with their heads in the 

 opposite direction, or towards the southeast. He was still more 

 surprised to find, that at the very time when the wind was 

 blowing with such violence from the southeast at Middletown, a 

 northwest wind was blowing with equal violence at a point less 

 than seventy miles distant from that place. On tracing further 

 the course and direction of prostrated objects, and comparing the 

 times when the storm reached diflFerent places, the idea flashed 

 upon his mind that the storm was a progressive whirlwind. A 

 conviction thus forced upon his mind after a full survey of the 

 facts was not likely to lose its grasp. Amid all his cares, it clung 

 to him, and was cherished with the enthusiasm usual to the stu- 

 dent of nature, who is conscious of having become the honored 

 medium of a new revelation of her mysteries. Nothing, however 

 could have been further from his mind, than the thought that the 

 full development of that idea, would one day place him among the 



