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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



fore doing so, however, it will be necessary to glance at the advances 

 in weather-research that have led to this undertaking. 



The exploration of the vast body of water which surrounds the 

 land-masses of the globe has been, since the sixteenth century, rapidly 

 prosecuted. Its configuration has been determined, its tides have been 

 weighed, its gulf-streams and counter-currents gauged, and even its 

 abyssal depths sounded and surveyed, until we can now hardly speak, 

 save by poetic license, of "the dark, unfathomed caves of ocean." But 

 the exploration of that other and almost boundless ocean of air which 

 envelopes the whole earth and w^hose winds sweejJ its surface, swaying 

 the waters of the sea and affecting every form of terrestrial life, has 

 progressed but slowly. The upper atmosphere is pierced by but few of 

 the earth's mountain-peaks upon which meteorological stations can be 

 efficiently maintained, while the spasmodic attempts at aeronautic in- 

 vestigation of the cloud-land, daring as they have been, have realized 

 less knowledge of its currents than that which Columbus in his voy- 

 ages of discovery acquired of the circulation of the equatorial waters. 

 Investigation has been, therefore, perforce restricted for the most part 

 to the phenomena of storms, cyclones, and anti-cyclones, moving at 

 the bottom of the great sea of air — phenomena involving such insig- 

 nificant portions of the atmosphere, when compared Avith the superin- 

 cumbent mass, that a leading meteorologist has hyperbolically likened 

 them to ordinary "smoke-rings." Eveii in the lower atmospheric 

 strata, the different national bands of observers have been widely sepa- 

 rated — here and there an ocean unsentineled rolling between them — 

 so that their collated reports conveyed no clearly connected account of 

 the transcontinental movements of air ; and it is to-day disjiuted by 

 some that North American storms cross the Atlantic to western Eu- 

 rope. But, worse than all else, the observations taken by the most 

 painstaking and indefatigable observers were, until recently, systemat- 

 ically vitiated, not only by a lack of uniformity in the methods, but 

 by the more fatal lack of uniformity in the hours of observation. 

 What would be thought of a little army confronting immense odds, 

 some of whose regiments had one plan of battle and some another, 

 some asleep when others were engaged, but none acting simultane- 

 ously ? Yet, such is a fair representation of the world's observational 

 force which was expected to attack the great problems of meteorology, 

 as it was until less than a decade ago. 



In 1870 the United States entered the field of weather-research ; 

 and, for the first time in the history of meteorology, there was then 

 established a broad system of simultaneous observations and simul- 

 taneous reports of the weather. These reports were immediately 

 worked up and graphically embodied in the simultaneous weather- 

 maps, issued thrice daily from the office of the Chief Signal-Officer, 

 U. S. A,, General Albert J. Myer, whose original and announced plan 

 was to observe the weather over the whole country " at the same mo- 



