Notwithstanding, Mr. Redfield asserts, or adopts the assertion, that the inquiry should be, "What are storms?" not "How are storms produced?" that inquiry should be a _rational_ one, and should not violate all analogy, or call for an explanation which science can not _rationally_ furnish. Mr. Redfield does not seem to have formed any just conception of the _immeasurable power_ of a hurricane, _five hundred miles in diameter_; or of the nature of that _rod_ which the _Almighty must insert in it, to whirl it with such violent and long-continued force_; nor any just conception of the tendency of the whirling mass, in the absence of his "cylindrical vessel," to fly off, tangentially, into the surrounding air; or of the nature or power of the centripetal force necessary to hold the gyratory mass in its current, and gather it in involute spirals toward a center. Nor has any other man who has witnessed, or read of mountain-tossed waves; of the largest ships blown down and engulfed; of towns submerged, and vessels carried far inland, and left in cultivated fields, by the subsidence of the sea; of sturdy forests and strongly-built edifices prostrated; or listened to the howling of the tempest, and felt his own house rock beneath him, been able to conceive of any known form of calorific or mechanical, or other power, acting from a comparatively small center, which could hold such an immense irresistable mass of whirling air in a circle, and _gather it_ in toward the center in gradually contracting spirals. I confess that, to my mind, it seems little less than a mockery of our intelligence for Mr. Redfield, or Professor Dove, or any other man, how distinguished soever he may be, to tell us that all this is the result of a "tendency to left-wise rotation" of ordinary winds, "coming into each other," or "over-sliding," or "meeting," or "encountering," on this "front," or that, down in Central America, or in the West Indies, or the monsoon region; or to talk of "lateral overflows" from mere gravity; of the ascent of warm air, or the descent of cold strata; of the _resistance of adjacent passive air_, or other mere _atmospheric resistances_ in connection with such _awful manifestations of power_. Their explanations of these phenomena are not rational, nor can they be believed by any rational man, who will bestow upon them half an hour of _comprehensive, unbiased reflection_. Waiving many minor points of great force, for this notice of Mr. Redfield's theory is already too much extended for my limits, I am constrained to take issue with him on the fact, and to assert, unhesitatingly, that in a _majority of instances no such barometric curve exists_.