Edward Joseph Lowe. 101 



EDWARD JOSEPH LOWE. 1825-1900. 



EDWARD JOSEPH LOWE was born at Highfield, near Nottingham, 

 in 1825, and was elected into the Royal Society in 1867. He was in 

 his sixteenth year when he began that series of meteorological obser- 

 vations and records which terminated only when, in 1882, he quitted 

 Highfield, and took up his residence at Shirenewton Hall, near Chep- 

 stow. He was one of the founders of the Royal Meteorological 

 Society, and assisted the late Professor Baden Powell in his observa- 

 tions on meteors for the British Association. 



In 1860 he accompanied the Government Eclipse Expedition to 

 Spain, taking charge of the meteorological department. 



Mr. Lowe's meteorological work commenced at a very early age, 

 and in this department he apparently continued a series of observations 

 at Highfield House, Nottingham, that had already been begun ; for a 

 printed table of "Meteorological Observations made at and near 

 Highfield House Observatory " appeared in ' Recreative Science,' 

 giving the mean temperature for each month from 1810 to 1859. His 

 own observations appear to have commenced in 1840, and were con- 

 tinued till 1882. From June 10, 1872, till April 3, 1882, he reported 

 observations by telegraph to the Meteorological Office, and from 1874 

 till 1882 he contributed returns of observations made at Oh. 45m. P.M. 

 each day to a collection of synchronous observations made at nearly 

 fifty stations in the British Isles, or in British possessions, for trans- 

 missiqn to the United States. 



But the contribution of numerical data was not by any means the 

 limit of his activity. He collected, from very various sources, informa- 

 tion concerning meteorological phenomena, and discussed it sometimes 

 synoptically as in the attempt to give a presentation of the state of 

 the weather over England during certain conspicuous thunderstorms, 

 which is contained in his Treatise on Atmospheric Phenomena (1846) ; 

 or during the eclipse of March 15, 1858* sometimes chronologically, 

 as in his pamphlet on the Chronology of the Seasons (1870), which 

 gives an account of remarkable frosts, droughts, and other exceptional 

 phenomena, which have been recorded as occurring in the British Isles 

 since A.D. 220. 



This latter work was to have been extended, and an introductory 

 portion assigning an eleven years' cyclical period to droughts was in 

 fact published in 1880 under the title " The Coming Drought, or Cycle 

 of the Seasons " ; but the question was not effectively worked out. 



* ' Roy. Soc. Proc.' vol. 9, p. 213. 



