1016] on Illusions of the Upper Air 623 



It may, of course, be only another illusion. The beauty of an 

 illusion is that we are only conscious of its existence when it has 

 ceased to exist. I suppose that there is no subject so fruitful of 

 illusions as the study of weather. The path of the history of science 

 is paved with their petrified remains. Ever since the world began 

 successive students of weather have always lived each in his own 

 paradise of working hypothesis with which he could gratify his 

 passion for tracing cause and effect, and which is just as good as 

 real until it is petrified by some stony fact. 



In the opening sentence of this lecture I referred to the origin 

 of the Meteorological Office in the language of Greek myth. 

 Permit me as a relief from the strain of strenuous meteorological 

 thinking to pursue the idea further, and to go back to the Gorgon 

 as a mythical eider sister of the Meteorological Office. The 

 Gorgon is in truth symbolical of the effect of the hard facts we 

 are accustomed to call trustworthy meteorological observations? 

 The suggestion may strike you at first sight almost as absurd as that 

 wind should really balance isobars, but are we not told that the 

 home of the Gorgon was assigned by some writers in the AVest, the 

 region of the Hesperides where our weather comes from, but by 

 others in Libya the South, the controlling region of the permanent 

 anticyclone ? There were snakes in her hair and she was girdled 

 with snakes, and we know that modern meteorology is made up of 

 cyclones, whose insidious name comes from kuklos, the coil of a 

 snake. What if the snakes of the Gorgon's hair and waist are 

 really cyclones ? She was the offspring of Neptune, born in the 

 Temple of Minerva. That is exactly what Greek myth would 

 say if it wanted to indicate such an event as the creation of meteoro- 

 logical observations by an arrangement between the Admiralty 

 and the Royal Society, through the intermediary of the Board of 

 Trade. For that crime her severed head is for ever in front of 

 Minerva's shield, and to this day if you tackle some of the 

 votaries of the goddess about her attitude towards the study of 

 weather, they will flash upon you the petrifying spectacle of the 

 accumulation of meteorological observations — too many snakes. 



Let me draw your attention to a remarkable piece of evidence 

 that the Gorgon is really a representation of meteorological observa- 

 tions. In " Nature " of June 4th, 1914 is a bird's-eye view of the 

 result of meteorological observations over the whole world, and I 

 place side by side with it one of the earliest representations of the 

 Gorgon's head.* The similarity between the cyclonic depressions of 

 the " Nature " artist and the coils of the Gorgon's hair is remarkable ; 

 even to the parting between the Northei'n and Southern hemispheres. 



One point more. In spite of the drastic treatment which she 



* The slide was taken from the picture of the grotesque Medusa found in 

 the foundations of the Parthenon in 1836 and now at Athens. 



