A CHAPTER IiV METEOROLOGICAL DISCOVERY. 787 

 A CHAPTER IN METEOROLOGICAL DISCOVERY. 



By JOHN COLEMAN ADAMS. 



ONE of the most interesting phases in the history of scientific 

 research is what may be called the co-operative feature. 

 No great machine is the invention of one mind. Few great 

 discoveries have been made in complete accuracy by any one 

 man. A locomotive is a mosaic of inventions, discoveries, and 

 improvements. It would be impossible to estimate the number 

 of minds which have contributed to the mighty structure, and 

 have slowly built up its complex perfections. The names of 

 Stephenson, Jervis, Winans, and Allen, in their successive con- 

 tributions to the devices by which the locomotive has increased 

 its capacities, but faintly hint the immense number who have 

 given some detail, some great or small modification and improve- 

 ment by which the vast and impressive result has been built up. 

 In the same way, every science grows to its completeness by the 

 accumulating discoveries of individuals, added from year to year 

 and century to century. Astronomy has gathered its harvest of 

 results by the hands of hundreds of patient toilers. Copernicus 

 established the true center of the solar system ; Kepler added the 

 three great laws which bear his name, relating to the orbits and 

 the periods of the planets ; Newton contributed the law of gravi- 

 tation. The science has been a growth, fed by the thoughts and 

 the painstaking labors of many minds. And while each of these 

 great men has furnished a distinct and complete contribution to 

 the total knowledge in the science, each has also depended upon 

 his predecessors for co-operation and the data which made his 

 own task possible of accomplishment. 



Just such a process as this has been going on in the young and 

 growing science of meteorology. It may be doubted if any other 

 branch of science in our century furnishes a more curious and 

 valuable illustration of the progress of discovery in a given field, 

 the corrections applied by later discoverers to the work of their 

 predecessors, the accumulation of facts and data till they are suf- 

 ficient for the formation of a working hypothesis, the modifica- 

 tions of the hypothesis in the light of new data, the application 

 of the theory to practical affairs, and the unification of the set of 

 phenomena thus investigated with other and all facts in the same 

 branch of science. The history of the investigations which 

 created our great system of observation and record, and made it 

 possible for a whole people to get daily bulletins of the morrow's 

 probable weather, is one of the most striking in the whole history 

 of science. Let us sketch it as it lies in the annals of the learned 

 societies of America, as yet both uncollected and unconnected. 



