259 
Generally speaking, the heaviest falls of rain occur in the 
summer months, in the form of storms and hard showers which, 
comparatively speaking, are not of long duration. In the winter 
the rains are more frequent and more continuous, and they fall 
more equably. There is a difference however in this respect 
between the west and the east of England, which calls for further 
remark, 
As far as my observation goes, heavy falls of rain in Bath, of 
short duration, are not equal to the falls which sometimes occur 
in the: Eastern Counties and in the neighbourhood of London. 
In Cambridgeshire formerly, I measured on two or three occasions 
a fall of considerably more than two inches, attendant upon thun- 
der-storms, within a very few hours: such a fall in one instance 
occurred within the period of two hours. A fall of rain that took 
place on July 26th, 1867, in the south-east part of England is 
recorded to have been 3.67 inches.* In London and the suburbs, 
during a thunder-storm on the Ist August, 1864, “rain mixt 
with hail is said to have fallen to the amount of 4 inches in 
three hours.”t No such falls of rain as these have ever been 
measured in Bath tomy knowledge. Even the greatest fall in 
twenty-four hours probably as a rule does not exceed an inch and 
a half.t During the ten years ending with February, 1875, the 
Registers of the Literary Institution show only three instances in 
which the greatest fall in twenty-four hours has made an approach 
to that quantity. In two of the years the greatest fall was less 
than an inch, whilst in three others it was very little more than 
an inch. 
This perhaps might be expected from the difference in the 
* Proceed. Brit. Met. Soc. vol. iv., p. 208. 
+ Id. vol. i, p. 179. 
{ The above was written previous to the very wet July of last year, 1875, 
when, on the 14th day of that month, there fell in the Institution Gardens, 
within the twenty-four hours, the exceptionally large amount of 2.750 inches. 
