My visit there will be merely out of respect to the public, and to the
new President.
I am sorry you have received so little information on the subject of our
winds. I had once (before our revolutionary war) a project on the same
subject. As I had then an extensive acquaintance over this State, I
meant to have engaged some person in every county of it, giving them
each a thermometer, to observe that and the winds twice a day, for one
year, to wit, at sunrise and at four P. M. (the coldest and the warmest
point of the twenty-four hours) and to communicate their observations to
me at the end of the year. I should then have selected the days in which
it appeared that the winds blew to a centre within the State, and
have made a map of them, and seen how far they had analogy with the
temperature of the air. I meant this to be merely a specimen to be
communicated to the Philosophical Society at Philadelphia, in order to
engage them, by means of their correspondents, to have the same thing
done in every State, and through a series of years. By seizing the days
when the winds centred in any part of the United States, we might, in
time, have come at some of the causes which determine the direction
of the winds, which I suspect to be very various. But this long-winded
project was prevented by the war which came upon us, and since that
I have been far otherwise engaged.
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