230 MATTHEW FONTAINE MAURY 



the Memphis Agricultural and Mechanical Society, on 

 October 17, 1871. In this speech he said that he had 

 dropped the subject at Brussels because the Royal 

 Society of London had advised against it, but that he had 

 ever since regretted this action because he had learned 

 that all Europe had been with him except Bavaria. He 

 then showed how the machinery for putting the scheme 

 into operation in the United States already existed. 

 *'You have your Signal Office", he declared, ''where 

 weather reports are continually received by telegraph, 

 and whence telegraphic forecasts are issued daily. . . . 

 You have also the Agricultural Bureau, in the service 

 of which reports embodying many of the facts and ob- 

 servations required are already made, or might be 

 without any additional expense. . . . Do you mean to 

 say that amid all the mind, means, and appliances of the 

 age, the relations between the weather and the crops 

 are past finding out? If I could, with just such a 

 system of researches for the sea, sit down in my office 

 and tell the navigator how he would find the wind, at 

 any season of the year, in any part of the ocean through 

 which he wished to sail, am I promising too much when I 

 tell you that by the plan I now propose the relation 

 between the weather and the crops is as capable of 

 scientific development as were the relations between 

 sea-voyages and the winds twenty-five years ago?" 

 At the close of the address, resolutions were offered that 

 the United States government be petitioned through the 

 State Department in favor of the establishment through 

 international cooperation of a plan of universal tele- 

 graphic meteorological observations and crop reports, 

 and that another conference similar to that of Brussels 

 in 1853 be called for that purpose. 



