498 SCIENTI1IC RECORD FOR 1883 



seven years of direct hourly observations by Eenou at the observatory 

 in the park of St. Maur. In "regard to this important work, Hann re- 

 marks that it is notable that we have never before received for any 

 part of France any similarly thorough work on diurnal variations, nor 

 have we as yet any systematic collection of climatic data for France, 

 such as corresponds to the need of modern climatology, and is well 

 illustrated in his own admirable text-book. (Z. 0. G. M., xvn, p. 290.) 



Buchan has published in the new edition of the Encyclopaedia Bri- 

 tannica, vol. xvi, a general popular treatise on meteorology as distin- 

 guished from climatology. There seems to have been a widespread 

 expectation that this treatise would be substantially a new edition of 

 his famous handy book of meteorology, for which many have been 

 waiting these ten years past; but it may be doubted whether the 45 

 quarto pages of the Encyclopaedia, excellent as they are, will be consid- 

 ered to replace the hoped-for volume; in fact, no satisfactory philo- 

 sophical treatise on meteorology can now be written without having as 

 a basis the works of Espy, Ferrel, Guldberg, Mohn, Hann, and numer- 

 ous other mathematical students of the mechanical and physical ques- 

 tions involved, and such studies seem to be as yet entirely ignored in Great 

 Britain (Haughton, Everett, and Archibald alone excepted). In fact, 

 the hopeless confusion of ideas that there prevails cannot be better 

 illustrated than by the fact that this same Encyclopaedia divides me- 

 teorology into two grand divisions, and allows the first as written by 

 Buchan to be followed by a memoir (of 25 pages) on terrestrial mag- 

 netism by Balfour Stewart. This second memoir is apparently a strong 

 plea for the parallelism and interdependence of meteorology and mag- 

 netism, the reader being throughout disarmed of all unreasonable pre- 

 judice against this innovation by the frequent use of the expression 

 "magnetic weather," lately adopted by Stewart, and by which is strictly 

 meant the fact that magnetic phenomena (declination, dip, force, and 

 their variations) present many analogies with meteorological phenom- 

 ena. The author, in his closing section (144), considers that terrestrial 

 meteorology has somehow produced and maintained the magnetic state 

 of the globe, and that, therefore, they ought to be studied together, as 

 the phenomena of the one will explain those of the other. 



If this latter view is the proper one to take, then we have Meteor- 

 ology the fundamental science, magnetism one of its many applications. 

 The magnetist must understand meteorology, just as with the stu- 

 dent of the tides, of navigation, of geographical distribution of plants, 

 of hygiene, of climatology, or of geology and vulcanology, for all 

 these and many other sciences have intimately to do with meteorology. 

 But it would be folly to say that these constitute parts of the study of 

 meteorology any more than of astronomy, or that the meteorologist 

 must necessarily study these. Meteorology stands in a general way as 

 the fundamental or parent science for the whole range of studies em- 



