PEESIDENTIAL ADDRESS — SECTION E. 249 



logical point of view, it assumes a new interest, for these 

 periods may coincide with the cycles of wet and dry seasons 

 which some meteorologists have deduced from the records of 

 our Australian climate, and the culmination of the one might 

 be related to some equivalent change in the other. For, if a 

 solitary auroral display be followed by a lowered sky, surely a 

 period of continuous auroras might give rise to a period of 

 continuous cloudy weather, with rain and snow. Fritz con- 

 siders that he has established this eleven-year cycle upon the 

 strength of auroral records extending from 1583 to 1874, and 

 his deductions have been verified by others. 



In January, 1886, we had a widespread and heavy rainfall, 

 and also an auroral display seen only at Hobart, but which 

 was sufficiently powerful to totally suspend communication 

 over all the telegraph lines situated between Tasmania and the 

 China coast. This sensitiveness upon the part of the electric 

 currents to auroral excitation is not novel, for long experience 

 on the telegraph wires of Scandinavia has shown that there is 

 such a delicate sympathy between them that the electric wires 

 there manifest the same daily and yearly periods of activity 

 as those that mark the auroras. The current that reveals 

 itself in fire in the higher regions of the atmosphere is precisely 

 the same current that plagues the operator in his office. 

 Therefore in the records of these troublesome earth-currents 

 now being accumulated we are collecting valuable data, which 

 may possibly enable the physicist to count the unseen auroras 

 of the Antarctic, to calculate their periods of activity and 

 lethargy, and again to check these with our seasons. But it 

 need hardly be said that the observations which may be made 

 in the higher latitudes and directly under the rays of the 

 Aurora Australis will have the greater value, because it is only 

 near the zone of maximum auroral intensity that the pheno- 

 mena are manifested in all their aspects. In this periodicity 

 of the southern aurora I have named the last scientific problem 

 to which I had to direct your attention, and I would point out 

 that, if its determination should give to us any clue to the 

 changes in the Australian seasons which would enable us to 

 forecast their mutations in any degree, it would give to us, in 

 conducting those great interests of the country which depend 

 for their success upon the annual rainfall, an advantage which 

 would be worth many times over all the cost of the expeditions 

 necessary to establish it. 



Finally, there is a commercial object to be served by 

 Antarctic exploration, and it is to be found in the establishment 

 of a whaling-trade between that region and Australia. The 

 price of whalebone has now risen to the large sum of £2,000 a 

 ton, which adds greatly to the possibilities of securing to the 

 whalers a profitable return. Sir James Eoss and his officers 



