JULIUS VON HANN 



By G. C. Simpson 



It is probably the lot of everyone to have had during life a regard 

 for some person which amounts almost to personal and intimate 

 friendship, although one may never have seen or even corresponded 

 with the object of that regard. Sometimes it is an author, some- 

 times a character in a book, and sometimes a historical personage, 

 but in every case the feeling is very real and vivid. The scientist 

 experiences this feeling quite as strongly as those of a more literary 

 turn of mind, and to many of us Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin are not 

 mere names met with in textbooks, but real live men worthy of 

 honor and devotion. 



To many meteorologists, certainly to all who can read German, 

 Julius von Hann appealed in this way. One knew from his writings, 

 seldom controversial, never militant, that he must be of a quiet re- 

 tiring nature, a conclusion confirmed by all those who have had the 

 pleasure of his acquaintance. One likes to picture him in his room in 

 the Hohe Warte in Vienna searching, always searching, in likely, 

 and more often in unlikely, places for any reference to weather con- 

 ditions which could add to our knowledge of the atmosphere and its 

 ways. 



And when Hann had once found a piece of weather information it 

 could never again be lost to the world. Within a month or two of 

 its discovery it was made known to all those whom it might concern 

 in the pages of the Meteorologische Zeitschrift ; but that was not all, 

 for Hann's encyclopaedic mind was able to see its relationship to other 

 factors, and like a piece in a puzzle it was fitted into its place to 

 make possible those masterly descriptions of climate found in his 

 Klimatologie and those clear accounts of atmospheric processes which 

 make up his Meteorologie. 



Hann started his life as a school-teacher, but at the age of 29 his 

 natural love of meteorology led him to enter the Central- Anstalt fur 



1 Reprinted from the Meteorological Magazine, Vol. 56, No. 670, November, 1921, by 

 permission of the controller of H. M. Stationery Office, London. 



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