114 ANNUAL RECORD OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 



ing the temperature, wind, barometer, and weather, and the 

 condition of the sea for the region within about five hundred 

 miles of London. This chart is prepared daily by the Lon- 

 don Meteorological Office, and furnished gratuitously to the 

 newspapers. The stereotype plate, fit for use in a Walter 

 printing-machine, is produced in about an hour. It is now 

 more than four years since a similar undertaking, on a some- 

 what different scale, was set on foot by Sir William Mitchell 

 in the Shipping Gazette of London, and which lias been con- 

 tinued daily. 



CONNECTION OF WEATHER AND COLLIERY EXPLOSIONS. 



Messrs. Scott and Galloway, of England, have continued 

 their researches into the connection between colliery explo- 

 sions and the weather. As the result of the study of two 

 hundred and twenty -four explosions, they state that the 

 amount of fire-damp recorded in the mines increases and 

 diminishes directly as the barometer falls and rises, proving 

 beyond the possibility of cavil that the variations of atmos- 

 pheric pressure have a marked influence on the rate at which 

 fire-damp escapes from fissures. In the large majority of the 

 fatal explosions the miners were using naked lights ; and 

 they suggest that if fire-damp is known to be present in any 

 part of the mines, then either the workmen should not be al- 

 lowed at any time to be near it, or else they should use safe- 

 ty-lamps in its vicinity, at least during the continuance of 

 the barometric depressions. They also suggest the interest 

 and value that would attach, both in a scientific and a prac- 

 tical point of view, to the keeping at coal-mines of baromet- 

 ric records, such as are daily furnished by the self-recording 

 apparatus which can now be obtained from every meteoro- 

 logical office. Quart Jour. Met. jSoc, London, II., 195. 



THE HOURLY DISTRIBUTION OF RAINFALL. 



Among the very few meteorological stations at which the 

 rainfall has been recorded either continuously or hourly is 

 to be noted that of Berne, in Switzerland, the observations 

 at which place for the past eight years have recently been 

 studied by Forster. The diurnal periodicity of rainfall, both 

 as regards its quantity and its frequency, follows at this place 

 a regular law, and, on the average of the year, it is shown 



