and,
in all essential particulars, accurately recorded observations of
the sky, during fifty years of a life of solitude and leisure; and
in all they contain of what may seem to the reader questionable, or
astonishing, are guardedly and absolutely true.

In many of the reports given by the daily press, my assertion of
radical change, during recent years, in weather aspect was scouted
as imaginary, or insane. I am indeed, every day of my yet spared
life, more and more grateful that my mind is capable of imaginative
vision, and liable to the noble dangers of delusion which separate
the speculative intellect of humanity from the dreamless instinct
of brutes: but I have been able, during all active work, to use or
refuse my power of contemplative imagination, with as easy command
of it as a physicist's of his telescope: the times of morbid are
just as easily distinguished by me from those of healthy vision, as
by men of ordinary faculty, dream from waking; nor is there a
single fact stated in the following pages which I have not
verified with a chemist's analysis, and a geometer's precision.

The first lecture is printed, with only addition here and there of
an elucidatory word or phrase, precisely as it was given on the 4th
February. In repeating it on the 11th, I amplified several
passages, and substituted for the concluding one, which had been
printed with accuracy in most of the leading journals, some
observations which I thought calculated to be of more general
interest. To these, with the additions in the first text, I have
now prefixed a few explanatory notes, to which numeral references
are given in the pages they explain, and have arranged the
fragments in connection clear enough to allow of their being read
with ease as a second Lecture.

HERNE HILL, _12th March, 1884_.

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THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

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THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Let me first assure my audience that I have no _arriere pensee_ in
the title chosen for this lecture. I might, indeed, have meant, and
it would have been only too like me to mean, any number of things
by such a title;--but, to-night, I mean simply what I have said,
and propose to bring to your notice a series of cloud phenomena,
which, so far as I can weigh existing evidence, a