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occurred upon the Tay. I may also name the storm of October 
13th and 14th, 1881, when the lowest reading was 28°455 at 
9 a.m. on the 14th—which laid low in a single night 4,200 trees 
at Alnwick, in Northumberland. 
The more accurate forecasting of such visitations is, I need not 
say, greatly to be desired; it is a matter to which, if I remember 
_ rightly, our own Bishop on one occasion called the attention of the 
Upper House—but is, as I need not say, greatly complicated by 
our peculiar position, having the vast breeding ground of the 
Atlantic Ocean to our west, which, if on the one hand it brings 
us with its currents the milder temperature of warmer regions, 
renders us also unfortunately liable to these sudden outbursts of 
unexpected storms. The Atlantic, indeed, is to our ordinary, what 
Ireland is to our political meteorology. 
Of other phenomena, the only ones to which I shall allude are 
those strange afterglows at sunset which in November and Decem- 
ber, 1883, enthralled all the lovers of nature to an astonishing 
degree; and which, beautiful in themselves, were still more 
interesting from the circumstance that, in the opinion of scientific 
men, they were the results of certain volcanic eruptions effected 
by Dame Nature on a stupendous scale so far back as the preceding 
August, far far away in the Straits of Sunda, between Java and 
Sumatra, and which resulted in the entire disappearance of an 
island 3000 feet in height. I have noted them as exceptionally 
brilliant on the 25th and 26th of November, and again on the 4th 
and 5th of December. It seems, as Mr. Norman Lockyer said at 
the time, somewhat difficult to imagine that a sunset in England 
in December, should owe its colouration to an event which took 
place many thousand miles away in August; but he and other 
observers were led, after full consideration of the evidence, to 
believe this really had been the case. Such an origin gave fresh 
interest to the phenomena; and as we watched the beauties of the 
‘skies, we were reminded once more that nothing in fiction is so 
Strange as facts ; and that the romance of Nature, as unfolded by 
science, throws into the shade the imaginings of the most fertile 
fancy, 
