1845.] Thirteenth Memoir on the Law of Storms in India. 735 



to urge the subject on the minds of others, and to elicit their views 

 as well as my own. 



Conclusion. 



Every man and every set of men who are pursuing the investigation 

 of any great question, are apt to overrate its importance ; and perhaps 

 I shall only excite a smile when I say, that the day will yet come when 

 ships will be sent out to investigate the nature and course of storms and 

 hurricanes, as they are now sent out to reach the poles or to survey 

 pestilential coasts, or on any other scientific service ; and it is be hoped 

 that England will in this, as in every other nautical investigation, take 

 the lead, and that without waiting till some astounding misfortune shall 

 force the investigation upon us. Nothing indeed can more clearly 

 shew how this may, with a well appointed and managed vessel be done 

 in perfect safety, than the experiment which the foregoing pages detail ; 

 performed by mere chance, by a fast sailing colonial brig, manned only 

 as a bullock trader, but capitally officered, and developing for the sea- 

 man and meteorologist a view of what we may almost call the internal 

 phcenomena of the winds and waves in a hurricane, — and these as mathe- 

 matically proved as the nature of things will allow, — which we could 

 scarcely have hoped ever to have obtained. The importance of the ques- 

 tions which arise when storms are considered in any of their relations, 

 in war or in peace, to a great Naval and Commercial Nation, and to 

 mankind in general, cannot I think now be doubted.* 



* While correcting this page for the press, we receive an account in the Newspapers 

 of the dismal catastrophe of the loss of the Emigrant ship Cataraqui, at the entrance of 

 Bass' Straits, in which 414 souls have perished in the prime of life! This vessel was 

 evidently on the Northern side of a rotatory gale, and swept, in all human probability, by 

 the storm wave, as in the analogous cases in the British Channel, far to the Eastward of 

 any supposed possible drift. 



o F 



