6 WRITINGS OF JOSEPH HENRY. [1855- 



METEOKOLOGY IN ITS CONNECTION WITH AGRICULTURE. 



PART I. — GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. 

 (Agricultural Report of Commissioner of Patents for 1855, pp. 357-374.) 



All the changes on the surface of the earth, and all the 

 movements of the heavenly bodies, are the immediate re- 

 sults of natural forces acting in accordance with established 

 and invariable laws ; and it is only by that precise knowl- 

 edge of these laws, which is properly denominated science, 

 that man is enabled to defend himself against the adverse 

 operations of nature, or to direct her innate powers in ac- 

 cordance with his will. At first sight, meteorology might 

 appear to be an exception to this general proposition, and 

 the changes of the weather and the peculiarities of climate 

 in different portions of the earth's surface to be of all things 

 the most uncertain and furthest removed from the dominion 

 of law; but scientific investigation establishes the fact that 

 no phenomenon is the result of accident, nor even of fitful 

 volition. 



The modern science of statistics has revealed a perma- 

 nency and an order in the occurrence of events depending 

 on conditions in which nothing of this kind could have been 

 supposed. Even those occurrences which seem to be left to 

 the free will, the passion, or the greater or less intelligence 

 of men are under the control of laws — fixed, immutable, and 

 eternal. No one knows the day nor hour of his own death, 

 and nothing is more entirely uncertain in a given case of ex- 

 pected birth, than whether a boy or girl shall be born; but 

 the number out of a million of men living together in one 

 country who shall die in ten, twenty, forty, or sixty years, 

 and the number of boys and girls who shall be born in a 

 million of births, may be predicted from statistical data with 

 almost unerring precision. The statistics of courts of justice 

 have disclosed the astonishing fact, — incomprehensible to our 

 understanding because we do not know the connecting in- 

 fluences which concur to produce the result, — that in every 



