while a like
coast-exposure in England is incessantly drenched; or to have
determined beyond a doubt that precisely as the ocean of water,
under the influence of the moon and wind, ebbs and flows and has
its succession of storms or calms, the ocean of air in which we
are enveloped answers to the influence of the sun in great tidal
movements, and has also its vast steadily moving waves of cold or heat
or moisture. These discoveries of general truths must be brought to
bear directly on men's daily life before they will have fulfilled
their true purpose. It would seem as if nothing were more easy than to
bring them so to bear. Meteorology, more intimately perhaps than any
other science, concerns our ordinary affairs. The health of mankind,
navigation, agriculture, commerce, the hourly business and needs of
every man, from the merchant sending out his cargo and the consumptive
waiting for death in the east wind, to the laundress hanging out
the family wash, are ruled by that most mysterious, most uncurbed
of powers, the weather. We may rub along through life with scanty
knowledge of the history of dead nations or the philosophy of living
ones, but heat and cold, the climate of the coming winter, yesterday's
rainfall or to-morrow's frost, are matters which take hold of every
one of us and affect us every hour of the day. Now, to bring the known
general truths of this science to practical rules, or to base upon
them predictions of storms or changes in the weather during any
future period, requires, as Sir John Herschel stated twelve years ago,
"patient, incessant and laborious observations, carried on in
every region of the globe." One reason why this is required is the
perpetually shifting conditions of heat, wind and storm. A man who sat
down to work a mathematical problem in the days of Job, if there was
such a man, found its result just the same as the school-boy does
to-day: figures not only never lie, but never alter. But the man who
solves an equation of which the winds and waters are members finds
that the sum to be added varies with every hour. There are, so far
as is yet known, no regularly recurring cycles of weather on which
to base predictions: the conditions of heat and wind and moisture are
never precisely the same at any given point. Hence the necessity, if
we would give the science stability and bring it to bear on our daily
life, of educated, skilled observers at different points to collect
and report simult