HIS LAST YEARS IN VIRGINIA 229 



The larger number of his addresses were delivered, how- 

 ever, in the interest of the establishment of a system of 

 universal telegraphic meterological observations and 

 crop reports, — the plan which he had urged for many 

 years before the Civil War and which that unhappy 

 conflict had cut short. Not long after his return to 

 Virginia, he began to consider this cherished plan again. 

 "You remember before the war", he wrote, "how hard I 

 tried to get up a Telegraphic Meteorological Bureau — ■ 

 writing and lecturing about it — now as meteorology for 

 the farmers, now as storm-signals combined with crop 

 statistics. When I was in England, during the war, I 

 proposed to Fitzroy, and after his death to his successor, 

 Toynbee, a plan for making, by means of an elastic 

 cloth stretched over his map, a caste of the atmosphere, 

 so that he might take in his whole field of observation at 

 a single glance, and so predict with more certainty. 

 Suppose, for instance, with his map pasted on a table, 

 he had bored a hole through London, Liverpool, Ports- 

 mouth, etc., and stuck up in each place a little rod 

 graduated for the barometer; that his elastic cloth was 

 then fitted to a slide so that he could set it at the height 

 of the barometer at each of the stations. Fancy each 

 rod to be surmounted by a wind-vane which could be 

 drawn out or shoved in, to show the force of the wind at 

 each place. Thus you would have a 'caste of the atmos- 

 phere', and see all about it. Brooke — 'deep-sea lead* 

 — has suggested just such a plan to Myer (General 

 Albert James Myer of the Signal Bureau in Washington) ; 

 and Myer, I have heard, has adopted it. The idea, I 

 think, was as original with Brooke as it was with me". 



The first address which Maury delivered on the plan 

 for land meteorological observations was at the fair of 



