e relationship between weather and the incidence of
disease. The interrelationship between these various meteorological
enterprises was not long in becoming apparent. Soon after its founding
in 1657 the Florentine academy undertook, through the distribution of
thermometers, barometers, hygrometers, and rain gauges, the
establishment of an international network of meteorological observation
stations, a network which did not survive the demise of the Accademia
itself ten years later.

Not for over a century was the first thoroughgoing attempt made at
systematic observation. There was a meteorological section in the
Academy of Sciences at Mannheim from 1763, and subsequently a separate
society for meteorology. In 1783, the Academy published observations
from 39 stations, those from the central station comprising data from
the hygrometer, wind vane (but not anemometer), rain gauge,
evaporimeter, and apparatus for geomagnetism and atmospheric
electricity, as well as data from the thermometer and barometer. The
Mannheim system was also short-lived, being terminated by the Napoleonic
invasion, but systems of comparable scope were attempted throughout
Europe and America during the next generation.

In the United States the office of the Surgeon General, U. S. Army,
began the first systematic observation in 1819, using only the
thermometer and wind vane, to which were added the barometer and
hygrometer in 1840-1841 and the wind force anemometer, rain gauge, and
wet bulb thermometer in 1843. State weather observation systems
meanwhile had been inaugurated in New York (1825), Pennsylvania (1836),
and Ohio (1842).[4]

Nearly 200 years of observation had not, however, noticeably improved
the weather, and the naive faith in the power of instruments to reveal
its mysteries, which had possessed many an early meteorologist, no
longer charmed the scientist of the early 19th century. In the first
published report of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science in 1833, J. D. Forbes called for a reorganization of procedures:

In the science of Astronomy, for example, as in that of Optics, the
great general truths which emerge in the progress of discovery,
though depending for their establishment upon a multitude of
independent facts and observations, possess sufficient unity to
connect in the mind the bearing of the whole; and the more
perfectly understood connexion of parts invites to further