466 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



In replying, Sir Napier Shaw said that the Maharajah's kind references 

 aroused a number of reminiscences. He remembered Maxwell bringing 

 Stokes to arrange about some experimental work, for the then newly formed 

 Meteorological Council, at the Cavendish Laboratory forty years ago. He 

 remembered his first attendance at a meeting of the Council in 1880 : Henry 

 Smith, Warren De la Rue, Captain Evans, Francis Galton, G. G. Stokes, and 

 Richard Strachey, a most powerful body of scientific directors. He remem- 

 bered an occasion in Cambridge in 1897 when the members of the Senate 

 assembled in Senate House Square were being pelted by undergraduates 

 with flour, eggs, and other missiles as an expression of opinion on the 

 admission of women to degrees. In the midst of the turmoil, Michael Foster 

 used the occasion to notify the wish of the Council of the Royal Society to 

 appoint him a member of the Meteorological Council ; the first business 

 at the subsequent meeting of the Council was a resolution of protest against 

 the appointment on the ground that the Royal Society had not consulted.the 

 Council. He remembered a meeting in Paris in the small chamber at the 

 very top of the Eiffel Tower in 1900, a doleful year for Englishmen in Paris, 

 where and when he was elected a member of the International Meteorological 

 Committee in succession to Dr. R. H. Scott, who had been secretary of the 

 Committee from the beginning in 1873. He remembered another meeting in 

 Paris in 1907, when Mascart, president of the Committee, was very ill and 

 unable to preside, and he had the awkward duty of taking the chair at his 

 own election as president, with a consequential understanding that it must not 

 happen again. 



And there,'were other reminiscences . He was old enough to have taken part 

 in the work of the Quarterly Weather Report, that great effort of the first 

 Meteorological Committee of the Royal Society which explored the phenomena 

 of travelling cyclones, and upon Galton's initiative and resourcefulness issued 

 facsimile reprints of the autographic records of seven observatories for twelve 

 years, probably the most stupendous piece of meteorological work ever 

 undertaken, and now perhaps unknown to the meteorologists of the present 

 company. He remembered also the great effort of the thirteen months of 

 daily charts of the Atlantic for the circumpolar year 1883, which was intended 

 to disclose the secrets of the travel of storms across the Atlantic, and has had 

 the opposite effect of convincing us of our abiding ignorance. 



He was reminded of the inauguration of telegraphic reports from Iceland in 

 1907 as the occasion for the Treasury making the first advance in nearly thirty 

 years in the grant for meteorology. The history of the past was conclusive 

 that the science of meteorology was nothing if not co-operative, and that all 

 nations had to contribute to the stock of knowledge. In that connection 

 he recalled the great service of Colonel Chaves, director of the meteorological 

 service of the Azores, in placing at the disposal of the meteorologists of Europe 

 the observations of that important group of Atlantic islands. It was curious 

 that, though the weather was a matter of interest and importance to every 

 inhabitant of the globe from the Pole, if there was anyone there, to the Equator, 

 where Dr. van Bemmelem was in charge, yet we had no organised profession 

 which provided for the study. It was apparent that it must be largely an 

 international profession because all the different aspects must be taken into 

 account. 



His most vivid recollection was that of the meeting of the Commission for 

 Weather Telegraphy in 19 12, when he was president of the Commission and 

 His Highness did them the honour of attending the meeting. His Highness 

 had many wide educational and scientific interests, and his interest in 

 meteorology, to which he gave expression by inviting the Commission to dinner, 

 was only part of his multifarious activities, and at the same time a striking 

 illustration of the universality of weather study. The speaker called upon 

 the company to drink His Highness's health. 



