HIS LAST YEARS IN VIRGINIA 235 



been very ill of the gout and was for a time on crutches. 

 Consequently, when he reached home after spending 

 some two weeks in St. Louis, he was too ill to attend the 

 first annual fair of the Seaboard Agricultural Society, 

 which he was to have addressed at Norfolk, Virginia, on 

 October 23. His address had already been prepared; 

 and as it turned out to be his last, its contents are of 

 peculiar interest. He appealed to the farmers in regard 

 to the necessity of cooperation for self-protection and 

 redress against transportation monopolies and all sources 

 of oppression and discouragement; he contended that 

 domestic commerce should be attended to by Congress 

 as carefully as foreign trade, but that special legislation 

 protected the latter while the former was left to the 

 tender mercies of great corporations; he touched upon 

 his favorite topic of weather observations and crop 

 reports, and many other questions such as tolls and 

 tariffs, the government of railroads, interior water lines 

 and canal projects, the conjunction of the Atlantic and 

 the Mississippi River valley, east and west trunk lines 

 and branches and the ways and means of constructing 

 them without increase of taxation, the regulation of 

 commerce between the states, the naval establishment 

 and wherein it needed reforms, immigration, and labor 

 and capital. 



Maury was destined not to live to see the scheme of 

 meteorological observations and crop reports, upon 

 which he had spent so much thought and labor, in opera- 

 tion ; but not long after his death a part of his program 

 was carried out when there was an international con- 

 ference of meteorologists at Vienna in 1873, the United 

 States being represented by General Albert James Myer 

 of the Signal Service of the Army. There are, indeed. 



