IVONSUCH 



the Year of our Primates One, as they still are in 

 a considerable percentage of our conversation of 

 A.D. 1932. Our far distant ancestor mouthed a 

 couple of what he imagined were pleasing grunts ; 

 we say " Good morning." 



Man's attitude toward the weather has been 

 either that of a worshipper — to patronize the good 

 weather and appease the bad — or else an interested 

 bystander, helplessly realizing that the slightest 

 deviation from the normal would roast or freeze or 

 drown or starve the very last of his race from the 

 surface of the planet. It is of course the effects of 

 weather that concern him. To the atmosphere, still 

 and of equable temperature, man gives never a 

 thought although it is his very breath of life, but 

 he blesses the rain in spring and curses it in autumn ; 

 frost is the boon of his grape, the bane of his orange 

 crop; winds bring health to him on land and de- 

 struction at sea; thunder and lightning may send 

 one human being rubber-booted, to hide in a feather 

 bed, while another, bare-headed, climbs to a hilltop, 

 drunk with ozone and the joy of elemental battle. 



The Romans very practically crystallized their 

 ideas of weather and incidentally, via the Greek 

 aWrjp, gave us the word itself — by reasonably as- 

 suming that ^ther was the son of Chaos and 

 Night — perhaps one of the several aliases of Ju- 

 piter who was the weather-man of Olympia. 



The greatest fun to be gotten out of the weather 

 is to isolate a tiny slice of it and make it our own. 

 A cool puff of air on Nonsuch sometimes wakes me 



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