478 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the waning moon, a hard year ; and the nearer the end of the moon, 

 so much the worse." This saying is typical of a good many others. 

 The fact that a festival is invariably selected, points to a purely su- 

 perstitious origin, for Ave have no physical grounds for supposing a 

 festival-day to determine the weather conditions which are to follow 

 any more than an ordinary day. Unlike the tables we have been dis- 

 cussing, there is not even the semblance of scientific authority here. 

 The chief agent is not physical, but religious. The moon is always 

 either waxing or waning ; it is her nature so to do. But that of itself 

 signifies nothing ; it is when Christmas happens upon a waxing or 

 waning period that we have the critical combination. 



Southey, in one of his letters, writes : " Poor Littledale has this 

 day explained the cause of our late rains, which have prevailed for 

 the last six weeks, by a theory which will probably be as new to you 

 as it is to me. ' I have observed,' he says, * that when the moon is 

 turned upward, we have fine weather after it ; but if it is turned 

 down, then we have a wet season : and the reason, I think, is, that 

 when it is turned down it holds no water, like a basin, you know, and 

 then down it all comes.' " Southey found, upon inquiry, that this was 

 a common notion in the lake district. George Eliot, as Mr. Harley 

 points out, has a reference to the same fancy in " Adam Bede." If 

 Jamieson's " Scottish Dictionary " is to be trusted, the same belief is 

 exactly reversed in Scotland. Jamieson states that it is considered as 

 an almost infallible presage of had weather if the moon " lies sair on 

 her back." Of the two forms of the saying, the English one is infi- 

 nitely to be preferred, for it embodies rather a pretty idea, while the 

 Scotch one is simply nonsensical. The moon might " lie sair on her 

 back " were it she herself that was " bad," but scarcely on account of 

 an approaching disturbance of the weather. To explain the condi- 

 tions under which the crescent moon is tilted forward or backward, 

 would require little short of a treatise on the lunar and terrestrial mo- 

 tions, a digression for which we have no space ; but it is sufficiently 

 obvious that to attribute an influence to the " attitude " of the visible 

 moon is open to the fatal objection that, like the " change," it is not a 

 sudden but a gradual phenomenon, which ought to exercise its influ- 

 ence through all the stages of its progress, instead of only when a 

 weather-wise person happens to notice it. 



One of the most curious, and certainly one of the most widespread, 

 of all weather beliefs is that of the " Saturday moon." The notion is 

 that when the new moon falls on a Saturday it is invariably followed by 

 a period of M'et and unsettled weather. The currency of this belief is 

 remarkably wide. Not only is it found (more or less modified) in the 

 folk-lore of England, Scotland, and Ireland, but it is held also by sea- 

 men of all nationalities. A traveler relates that he once heard it re- 

 ferred to by a Chinese pilot. And more than this, in 1848, a Dr. Fors- 

 ter announced to the Royal Astronomical Society, as the result of an 



