330 



Mr. B. H. Scott 



[May 4, 



for no port at present will bear the expense of maintaining lamps for 

 night signals. If we allow an hour or so for the warning message to 

 reach the distant stations, and most of them take much longer than 

 that, we see that in winter a warning to a Scotch port must leave 

 London at 2 p.m. to be in ■ time to be communicated by signal. 

 Warnings issued at 7 p.m. rarely come to the fisherman's knowledge 

 till next morning, even if they should reach the telegraph station 

 before that office closes for the night. 



Accordingly the figures in the table give a somewhat too favourable 

 idea of our real success in warning. 



The diagram also does not show the storms which have been 

 missed. Of these there are instances every year. That of October 

 23-4, 1882, was a most striking case. The storm came on so suddenly, 

 not setting in at any station before midnight, and raging with full 

 fury at 8 a.m., that with our present knowledge it appears to have 

 been impossible to have caught it. 



It would take me too long were I to continue this subject, and I 

 would only impress upon my hearers that accidents must happen like 

 that of October last, and that we must only not let them discourage us, 

 and do our honest best. 



The practical result of our forecasting of weather is that while we 

 are generally fairly correct as to the direction and force of wind, we 

 are most liable to fail in predicting rain, esj)ecially as to its amount. 

 In fact not only we, but every Meteorological Office in Europe, have 

 to confess inability to foretell rain, quantitatively, to say whether the 

 rain expected to fall will be only slight, or a deluge. In no single 

 case have exceptionally heavy falls, either local, like thunderstorms, 

 or general rains, been foretold. I take as instances, the rain of April 

 13, 1878, in London, which burst so many sewers; the hail-storm at 

 Eichmond, August 3, 1879, which will long be remembered in Kew 

 Gardens; or lastly, the snow-storm of January 18, 1881. 



These failures are very serious defects in practice, and apparently 

 are in great measure attributable to our own ignorance of the conditions 

 of the upper strata of the atmos23here. 



Attempts have been made in various directions to organise systems 



