FIFTY YEARS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE ii 



material prosperity. Of old the wind blew where it listed, 

 the rain fell on the just and the unjust alike, and men recked 

 no more of the hurricane than of the earthquake, for both 

 were ascribed to malevolent and unavoidable fate. The dark 

 confession of weakness still clings to those who go down to the 

 sea in ships, making them the most superstitious of modern 

 folk, and it crops up uncannily in the exemption phrase of 

 even modern transatlantic contracts, ''acts of God excepted." 

 Against this blighting faith in the malign Franklin set himself 

 a century before Henr}^, when he led lightning from the skies 

 on a kite string, and invented the lightning rod; but the real 

 awakening began with the Smithsonian institution. For 

 twenty years the work was little more than observation in 

 eastern cities, giving data for laws, but not the laws them- 

 selves. During the reaction from the civil war several mili- 

 tary men turned toward nobler conquest, and observation was 

 extended and systematized in a science so definite as to confer 

 the gift of prevision. Up to the present generation the prin- 

 cipal contributions to meteorology came from Europe, and 

 such names as Buys-Ballot, Buchan, Dove, and Delaunay 

 were better known in this country than those of our own in- 

 vestigators, while so late as 1875 the data for Coffin's Winds of 

 the Globe were submitted to the Russian Weikoff for discus- 

 sion before they were issued by the Smithsonian institution. 



Now the tide has turned. Generals Hazen and Greely 

 and the civilians Harrington and Moore have built up the 

 largest weather bureau in the world, and with the aid of phys- 

 icists like Ferrel, Abbe, and Mendenhall have shaped weather 

 science; while Langley has led thinkers into new paths by his 

 studies of the internal work of the wind, and their application 

 to problems of aerial flight. Much of the success of American 

 air science must be ascribed to the accident of geography, 

 which gives a broader field for the study of the atmosphere 

 than any other nation enjoys — more favorable, even, than 

 the two empires of Russia. Yet geographic bigness is but one 

 of the elements of American greatness, in this as in other de- 

 partments of knowledge, such as engineering, geology, and 

 anthropology. To-day a central office co-ordinates observa- 

 tions not only from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the 



