Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/127

Rh toward the northwest, and in another part in the opposite direction or toward the southeast, and to learn that while the wind had been blowing violently from the southeast at Middletown, it had been blowing just as violently less than seventy miles away from the northwest. These facts and his reflections upon them led him to certain conclusions which business engagements prevented his developing at the time, but which he published, fortified by the citation of numerous observations and with illustrations drawn from other storms, in an article in the American Journal of Science for January, 1832, on The Prevailing Storms of the Atlantic Coast. His conclusions were, in short, that the storm was a great advancing whirlwind, and that tornadoes generally revolve on an axis of rotation and move with the main currents, exhibiting, consequently, retrograde motion on one side of the axis and progressive motion on the other side. In a subsequent article in the same journal he discussed the hurricane of August, 1831, as illustrating the position that storms and hurricanes are gyratory in action, and move with the general current of the region in which they occur. These views are now in the main accepted facts in meteorology.

Prof. Olmsted gives, in his memorial address, a very interesting account of the way the first article came to be published. In it we have a picture of the man Redfield. "I chanced at this period,"he says, "to meet him for the first time on board a steamboat on the way from New York to New Haven. A stranger accosted me, and modestly asked leave to make a few inquiries respecting some observations I had recently published in the American Journal of Science on the subject of hailstorms. I was soon made sensible that the humble inquirer was himself a proficient in meteorology. In the course of the conversation he incidentally brought out his theory of the laws of our Atlantic gales, at the same time stating the facts on which his conclusions were founded. This doctrine was quite new to me, but it impressed me so favorably that I urged him to communicate it to the world through the medium of the American Journal of Science. He manifested much diffidence at appearing as an author before the scientific world, professing to be only a practical man, little versed in scientific discussions, and unaccustomed to write for the press. At length, however, he said he would commit his thoughts to paper and send them to me on condition that I would revise the manuscript and superintend the press. Accordingly, I received the first of a long series of articles on the law of storms and hastened to procure its insertion in the Journal of Science. Some few of the statements made in the earliest development of his theory he afterward found reason for modifying, but the great features of that theory appear there in bold relief."