Romme (brother of the Conventionalist, principal author of the Calendar) laid the foundations of our very important science. English seamen had remarked that in the tempests in the Indian Seas, they sailed for days together, and yet made no headway. Romme collected and systematized all their observations, and pointed out the important fact that the same occurred in the tempests of China, Africa, and the Antilles. He also first pointed out that rectilinear winds are of rare occurrence, and that, usually, tempests have a circular character,--are, literally, a _whirl_ wind. The great _whirling_ tempests of the United States in 1815, and that of 1821 (the year of the great eruption of Hecla) when the winds blew from all points to a common centre, aroused philosophical attention, both in America and Europe. Brande, in Germany, and at the same time, Redfield in New York, were the next after Romme in profiting by these facts to lay down the law that, generally, the tempest is a _Whirl_-wind, advancing, and at the same time _revolving on its own base_. In 1838, the English engineer, Reid, being sent to Barbadoes after the too celebrated tempest which killed fifteen hundred people, ascertained, with mathematical precision, this double movement of advance and rotation. But his still more important discovery was that _in our northern hemisphere the tempest turns from right to left_, that is to say from East to North, and round the compass, back to East; while in _southern tempests it turns from left to right_. A most important fact to regulate the seaman's course. Reid very rightfully gave his book the bold title of--"On the Law of Storms." But it was the law of their _Motion_, not the explanation of their _cause_; it told nothing, either, of what Storms do, or of what they are. Here France came to the rescue. In 1840, Peltier published his _Causes of Whirlwinds_, and his ingenious and numerous experiments established the fact that whirlwinds, whether at sea or on shore, were _electrical phenomena_, in which the winds play only a secondary part. Beccaria, a full century earlier, had suspected that fact, but it was reserved for Peltier to establish the fact, by making miniature storms. Electrical whirlwinds readily take their rise in the neighborhood of volcanoes,--those ventilating pipes of the subterranean world, and therefore they are more common in the subterranean world, than in ours. The Atlantic, open at both ends, and swept in all directions by the winds, should necessarily, have more rectilinear, and fewer circular tempests; but Piddington quotes a great number of the latter.