THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 151 



Long Range Weather Predictions: — When an Eng- 

 lish scientist announces that it will be warm in Cairo, Egypt, 

 tomorrow since it is cold in London, today and that the rain- 

 fall will be unusually heavy in England this winter since it was 

 unusually light in Cuba last summer ; when another says that a 

 light rainfall in Chile during the period from May to August 

 will be followed during July to October by more than ordi- 

 nary floods on the Nile; when a Japanese mathematician says 

 that the rice crop in northern Japan will be large this fall 

 since the barometer was unusually high last spring over China ; 

 when the scientists begin making long-range and curiously 

 disconnected forecasts as these, it would seem that they are 

 beginning to understand something of how this complicated 

 atmosphere of ours works. * * * * Many such 

 correspondences between weather happenings in widely separ- 

 ated parts of the world have been shown. The rainfall of the 

 central United States shows a direct correspondence to that 

 of central South America and both show an inverse relation 

 to the rainfall of Australia. A forecast of temperature at 

 Berlin in March and April is possible at the end of December 

 from the temperature of Christinia, Norway. When the April 

 temperature at Irkutsk, Siberia, is higher than the normal. 

 we may expect with a high degree of probability that the tem- 

 perature of San Francisco in the following July will be ab- 

 normally low and conversely. The higher the barometric 

 pressure in the Argentine and Chile during March and April, 

 the greater will be the Monsoon rainfall of India the follow- 

 ing July and August. — Thomas A. Blair in Scientific Monthly. 



The Industrious Ant. — Travellers through our South- 

 west cannot have failed to notice the over-sized ant-hills scat- 

 tered liberally over the plains. The casual observer notes the 

 cone-shaped hills like small volcanoes, each surrounded by a 

 wide circle of cleared ground, but unless he carefully examines 



