ACTION OF MAN ON THE WEATHER. 609 



practical account, but the speculations of this able meteorologist 

 are not, for that reason, to be rejected as worthless. His labors 

 exhibit great industry in the collection of facts, much ingenuity 

 in deahng with them, remarkable insight into the laws of nature, 

 and a ready perception of analogies and relations not obvious to 

 minds less philosophically constituted. They have unquestion- 

 ably contributed essentially to the advancement of meteorological 

 science. 



The possibiHty that the distribution and action of electricity 

 may be considerably modified by long hues of iron railways and 

 telegraph wires, is a kindred thought, and in fact rests much on 

 the same foundation as the behef in the utility of hghtning-rods, 

 but such influence is too obscure and too uncertain to have been 

 yet demonstrated, though many intelKgent observers believe that 

 sensible meteorological effects have been produced by it. 



It is affirmed that battles and heavy cannonades are generally 

 followed by rain and thunder-storms, and Powers has collected 

 much evidence on this subject,* but the proposition does not 

 seem to be by any means established. 



Besistcmce to Great Natv/ral Forces. 



I have often spoken of the greater and more subtile natural 

 forces, and especially of geological agencies, as powers beyond 

 human guidance or resistance. This is no doubt at present true 

 in the main, but man has shown that he is not altogether im- 

 potent to struggle with even these mighty servants of nature, 

 and his unconscious as well as his deliberate action may in some 

 cases have increased or diminished the intensity of their energies. 

 It is a very ancient behef that earthquakes are more destructive 

 in districts where the crust of the earth is solid and homosreneous, 

 than where it is of a looser and more interrupted structure. 

 Aristotle, Phny the elder, and Seneca believed that not only nat- 



* War and tJie Weather, or the Artificial Production of Rain, Cliicago, 1871. 

 Paifer proposed, as early as 1814, arrangements for producing rain by firing 

 cannon and exploding shells in the air. — Mn wunderbarer Traum die Frucht- 

 barkeit durch willkurlichsn Regen zu bef&rdern, Metz, 1814. See, on the ques- 

 tion of the possibility of influencing the weather by artificial means, London 

 ^Quarterly Journal of Science, xxix., p. 126, and Nature, Feb. 16, 1871, p. 806. 

 26* 



