50 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [ Fes. 
certained governing standard. Moreover, the elevation of the 
barometer-cisterns above the sea-level has been determined for ex- 
ceedingly few stations out of Bengal. I need hardly remark, that 
registers of observations, which are subject to such drawbacks as 
these are unfortunately restricted in value. 
The laborious, yet indispensable work of reducing the observa- 
tions is but partially performed. Only in Bengal, and perhaps in 
Bombay, is the reporter furnished with a staff competent to relieve 
him of this purely mechanical duty. The result is, that most of the 
registers give the observations in their crude unreduced state ; and 
therefore not generally available as data in extended investiga- 
tions. 
In Burma there is no established system of observation at all. 
Observers at Akyab and Port Blair send registers to the reporter 
for Bengal; but the most important of these registers is kept up 
solely by the voluntary exertions, and activity of the Civil Surgeon, 
who might at any moment leave his post and so extinguish the 
station as a place of meteorological record. 
In Bengal again, curiously enough, the central Meteorological 
Observatory is quite independent of the Local Reporter, who is thus 
not only powerless in regard to the principal station of his own 
province, but is also reduced to the alternative of either testing his 
instruments himself personally, or of entrusting them for this 
object to officers, over whom he has no control. He is, moreover, 
in this way deprived of the means of carrying out any special ex- 
perimental inquiry, however important it may be for the regulation 
of his own work. 
I may add that, at Caleutta, even to this day, as our Council 
knows too well, for one reason or another we have nothing that we 
can offer to the scientific Societies of the West in exchange for their 
publications in meteorology. The so-called Observatory in Park 
Street, Jucus a non lucendo, is so placed that no effective observa- 
tion of the sky can be had from it. I need hardly say that often- 
times the forms and behaviour of the clouds give most important 
information relative to movements and even to the constitution of 
air masses at high altitudes. One or two especial instances of this 
have occurred lately, but our official observers have literally been 
unable to notice them. 
