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tween the greatest violence of the storm at the two places.
But it is not my purpose here to cite all the cases on record of gales that have attracted the attention of scientific men. Enough has been said to show that such men did notice the peculiar character of these storms and to some extent explained it by deciding that they were great whirlwinds. None of them, however, followed up the clue thus found, or attempted to unlock the secret of the Law, to which this was evidently the key until the year 1831, when Mr. William Redfield, an American Philosopher and Naval Architect, came out in a paper published in the American Journal of Science, and clearly demonstrated that the storms on the American Coast were not only rotatory storms or blowing in circles around a common centre, but also that they had a progressive motion and were traceable moving on a curved track, from the West Indies and along the Coast of the United States, curving off to the Eastward near the banks of Newfoundland. At the same time he published some excellent rules for avoiding the centre, and the chances of damage to ships caught in these gales at sea, showing also how the barometer might be made a valuable guide if carefully watched and properly attended to.
While Mr. Redfield was employed collecting the information upon which he based his theory of the law of storms, a similar investigation was going on in Germany.
A number of gales had attracted the attention of German Meteorologists chiefly on account of the oscillations and great fall of the barometer before and during these gales; and a Mr. Brande who had kept an accurate register of observations for a length of time, and obtained the registers kept in various places at the same time, eventually advanced a theory that the wind, during these great storms, blew from all points of the compass in straight lines towards a central space where the barometer was for the time at its lowest stand.
The theory of Mr. Brande was disputed by Professor Dove of Berlin who subjected the observations to a new examination, and made it appear that an explanation of all
