24 UNCERTAINTY OF MODERN METEOROLOGY. 
There is one branch of research which is of the utmost im- 
portance in reference to these questions, but which, from the 
great difficulty of direct observation upon it, has been less suc- 
cessfully studied than almost any other problem of physical 
science. I refer to the proportions between precipitation, 
superficial drainage, absorption, and evaporation. Precise ac- 
tual measurement of these quantities upon even a single acre of 
ground is impossible ; and in all cabinet experiments on the sub- 
ject, the conditions of the surface observed are so different from 
those which occur in nature, that we cannot safely reason from 
one case to the other. In nature, the inclination and exposure 
of the ground, the degree of freedom or obstruction of the flow 
of water over the surface, the composition and density of the 
soil, the presence or absence of perforations by worms and small 
burrowing quadrupeds—upon which the permeability of the 
ground by water and its power of absorbing and retaining or 
transmitting moisture depend—its temperature, the dryness or 
whereas an easterly current comes from the west, and flows towards the east.” 
—Pihysical Geography, p. 229. 
There is no philological ground for this distinction, and it probably originated 
in a confusion of the terminations -wardly and -e7ly, both of which are mod- 
ern. The root of the former ending implies the direction to or to-wards which 
motion is supposed. It corresponds to, and is probably allied with, the Latin 
versus. ‘the termination -erly is a corruption or softening of -ernly, easterly 
for easternly, and many authors ef the seventeenth century so write it. In 
BHakluyt (i., p. 2), easterly is applied to place, ‘‘ casterly bounds,” and means 
eastern. Ina passage in Drayton, ‘‘ easterly winds”? must mean winds from 
the east; but the same author, in speaking of nations, uses northerly for 
northern. Hakewell says: ‘‘ The sonne cannot goe more southerney from ys, 
nor come more northernely towards vs.” Holland, in his translation of Pliny, 
referring to the moon, has: ‘‘ When shee is northerly,” and ‘‘shee is gone 
southerly.” Richardson, to whom I am indebted for the above citations, 
quotes a passage from Dampier where westerly is applied to the wind, but the 
context does not determine the direction. The only example of the termina- 
tion in -wardly given by this lexicographer is from Donne, where it means 
towards the west. 
Shakspeare, in Hamlet (v., ii.), uses northerly wind for wind from the north. 
Milton does not employ either of these terminations, nor were they known to 
the Anglo-Saxons, who, however, had adjectives of direction in- an or -en, 
