544 



METEOKOLOGY. 



time Meteorology was fully aroused by the la- 

 bors of Redfield, Reid, and those who preceded 

 them in their inquiry into the laws of storms. 

 Humboldt, Dove, Ritter, Lenz, Herschel, Sa- 

 bine, Kamtz, all contributed to urge the neces- 

 sity of meteorological observations on the ocean. 

 In fact, marine logs had for centuries contained 

 the usual weather notes, and in the " Philo- 

 sophical Transactions 1 ' for 1723, No. 379, p. 

 422, and in a subsequent number, " Mr. Isaac 

 Greenwood, Professor of Mathematics at Cam- 

 bridge, New England, gives a form for marine 

 observations, and recommends taking them 

 regularly." But the charting and study of the 

 data contained in these logs was an herculean 

 task, that seems to have been performed in a 

 fragmentary way by the compilers of ocean 

 "Directories" and "Coast Pilots," and by 

 the individual students of storms, etc., al- 

 though the admiralty offices of European na- 

 tions afforded abundant stores of materials, 

 and although the British Admiralty began such 

 work (1795-1807) under Secretary Marsden, 

 who, for convenience, first divided the ocean 

 into 5 degree squares. A considerable degree of 

 uniformity was secured, as to the methods and 

 instruments used by navigators, by the deliber- 

 ations of the Maritime Conference at Brussels. 

 The systematic collation of this material, and 

 its reduction to useful charts, have been only re- 

 cently undertaken on a comprehensive scale. 

 M. F. Maury is generally recognized as the fa- 

 ther of modern Marine Meteorology : his great 

 activity as an individual from 1839 to 1844 is 

 only surpassed by the still greater official work 

 that he prosecuted from that date up to 1861, 

 while in charge of the United States Naval Ob- 

 servatory. In the same rank, as being inde- 

 pendent and equally important, we must men- 

 tion Buys-Ballot, who commenced in 1849, 

 and since 1854 has carried on a most extensive 

 work as director of the Meteorological Institute 

 of the Netherlands. In a similarly indepen- 

 dent and indefatigable manner, Meldrum has 

 since 1851 prosecuted the study of the storms 

 and meteorology of the Indian Ocean, with 

 some help from the local government and the 

 Mauritius Meteorological Society. The result of 

 the Brussels Conference of 1853 was to redou- 

 ble national enterprise in this work, as shown 

 by the following dates of organization : 1854 

 Maritime Meteorology officially added to Buys- 

 Ballot's duties under the Minister of Interior ; 

 Fitz Roy appointed in charge of Meteorological 

 Department of the London Board of Trade ; the 

 Portuguese Admiralty take up Ocean Meteor- 

 ology in connection with the Observatory of 

 Infante Dom Luiz. 1858 Organized in France 

 under the Minister of the Marine. 1867 The 

 Adria Commission under the Austrian Minis- 

 ter of Interior and Commerce ; the Hamburg 

 Seewarte. 1874 Russia. 1875 France reor- 

 ganized ; Germany, Hydrographic Office and 

 Seewarte. 1876 United States Hydrographic 

 Office reorganized after an interregnum of fif- 

 teen years. 1877 Sweden, under three commis- 



sioners ; Spain, at the Marine Observatory San 

 Fernando. 1878 Denmark, Minister of the 

 Marine. Further details as to the present con- 

 dition of Maritime Meteorology may be ob- 

 tained from the Proceedings of the First In- 

 ternational Meteorological Congress at Vienna, 

 1873 ; of the Conference on Maritime Meteor- 

 ology held in London, 1874; the reports of 

 the Permanent Committee of the Vienna Con- 

 gress, 1874-'78; and the Proceedings of the 

 Second International Meteorological Congress 

 to be held at Rome in April, 1879. It is only 

 by the harmonious cooperation of all nations on 

 land and sea that we can hope to accumulate 

 materials for properly studying the normal 

 and abnormal conditions of the atmosphere, 

 and the laws that control storms, floods, 

 droughts, etc. ; and at the present time, such 

 cooperation seems to be assured from every 

 nation. 



METEOEOLOGICAL INSTKUMENTS AND METH- 

 ODS. The principal recent advances relative to 

 methods and instruments may be briefly noticed 

 as follows : Wild's memoir on the temperature 

 of the air at Russian stations strongly urges 

 the insufficiency and positive errors that have 

 been introduced by too careless use of the 

 Bessel or Fourier functions. These physicists 

 had in the early part of this century shown 

 that any series of observations of natural phe- 

 nomena can be closely represented by a series 

 of terms of the form sin. 5 ; cos. 5 ; sin. 2 b ; cos. 

 2 &, etc., or equivalent developments ; whence 

 it followed that a few observations at regular 

 intervals could furnish the means of deter- 

 mining the coefficients for these terms in an 

 equation that would then become the expres- 

 sion of a natural law. Strictly speaking, how- 

 ever, the equation is simply an empirical for- 

 mula, presenting concretely the actual obser- 

 vations and no more ; it is a convenient formula 

 for computing approximate values of the ob- 

 served quantities within the limits of the range 

 of observations. But occasionally the mistake 

 has been made of deducing from such formulas 

 conclusions to which the original observations 

 of themselves would give no countenance ; and 

 in this way, from a few observations, erroneous 

 views have obtained credence that would never 

 have been promulgated had sufficiently nu- 

 merous observations been made. Wild, there- 

 fore, urges with great force that in studying 

 nature we must adhere to observations ; that 

 these can not be too frequent and minute, and 

 that they can be safely and easily presented 

 for study by many graphic methods, when the 

 algebraic formula) would be misleading and 

 laborious. Graphic methods of presentation, 

 followed by similar methods of analysis and 

 study, promise to be of increasing usefulness 

 in meteorology, especially because the com- 

 plicated problems that are daily presented in 

 systematic weather predictions demand expe- 

 ditious methods of resolution, and involve the 

 consideration of that irregular distribution of 

 land, ocean, and aqueous vapor, which promises 



