226 



NA TURE 



[July 8, 1897 



•Calendar " ; also by a complete " Annual Calendar " for 

 ■each of the fifty-two years of the Calendar round, and a 

 •complete "Chronological Calendar" for three great 

 cycles. In these three great cycles all the dates as yet 

 found in the inscriptions can be located ; and, according 

 Ko Mr. Goodman's theory of a Grand Era of seventy-three 

 great cycles, these three great cycles are numbered the 

 53rd, 54th and 55th. 



No doubt the first objection raised to the scheme will 

 be the improbability of the Mayas having had a chrono- 

 logical system extending over 374,400 years, the number 

 ■of years composing a Grand Era. And the objection will 

 have all the more force, in that no such time period is 

 mentioned by Landa or any other authority. Mr. Good- 

 man says the Grand Era is a necessity to round off the 

 various time periods on which the Mayas rested their 

 computations. It does not appear to me that this would 

 of itself necessitate a phenomenal antiquity for Maya 

 •civilisation, for the Mayas, like every other race, must 

 have been confronted by the question, " When did time 

 begin?" We ourselves have avoided the difficulty by 

 taking a certain point of time, and reckoning forwards 

 from it and backwards until we are lost in the mists of 

 antiquity ; but it must be remembered that it is only in 

 the last few years that the date 4004 B.C. has disappeared 

 as a marginal note from the first chapter of Genesis. Is 

 it, therefore, impossible to believe that a people may 

 have reckoned backwards to an imaginary beginning of 

 time, fixed by a purely arithmetical calculation as the point 

 when all the complicated time periods with which they 

 were in the habit of reckoning could have started fair ? 

 How those time periods became so complicated, and 

 needed such a vast stretch of time to work themselves 

 out, is another matter — possibly it may have originated 

 from the combination of various methods of reckoning 

 •time employed by different branches of the race. How- 

 ever, I must not start theorising on my own account, 

 but refer the reader to the chapter on the "Era and 

 Duration of the Archaic Maya Civilisation," where Mr. 

 Goodman gives reasons for his belief in the great 

 antiquity of Maya civilisation, and shows that be- 

 tween the earliest and latest dates recorded on the 

 sculptures at Palenque there is a difference of 7082 

 years. 



I am so fully aware of my own incompetence to deal 

 with such an abstruse subject as the construction of 

 Calendar systems, that I shall not venture on any 

 •critical review of Mr. Goodman's methods or conclusions ; 

 but 1 am glad to have an opportunity of saying that my 

 acquaintance with Mr. Goodman and with his partner 

 in his investigations. Dr. Gustav Eisen, commenced 

 with a correspondence about the drawings of the inscrip- 

 tions published in the " Biologia Centrali Americana " ; 

 and when I was afterwards able again to compare these 

 drawings with the original sculptures, I found that the 

 alterations of form suggested to- me with regard to cer- 

 tain obscure and weather-worn minerals and glyphs had 

 nearly always to be confirmed as correct. Then, as Mr. 

 •Goodman's methods became more familiar to me, I found 

 myself constantly making use of the results at which he 

 had arrived without any opportunity of acknowledging 

 the source of my information. I was therefore urgent 

 with him to publish the results of his researches, although 

 he lingered fondly over his work, by no means considering 

 it as yet complete. 



Since commencing this article a photograph of a carved 

 inscription, lately discovered on the banks of the Rio 

 Usumacinta, has been forwarded to me from Yucatan 

 by Mr. T. Maler. This inscription contains forty-eight 

 glyphs. With the use of Mr. Goodman's tables I am 

 able to locate (in the Maya Calendar) the date expressed 

 in the inscription, and to follow five distinct reckonings 

 to other dates— the reckoning made with the tables 

 :giving in every case the same result as that which is 



NO. 1445, VOL. 56] 



expressed in the inscription — and can thus ascertain with 

 certainty the meaning of twenty-two out of the forty- 

 eight glyphs contained in the inscription. 



Alfred P. Maudslay. 



TWENTY YEARS OF INDIAN 

 METEOROLOGY. 



SOME years ago, when the Indian Meteorological 

 Service was started, under the directorship of the 

 late Mr. H. F. Blanford, F.R.S., he predicted that the 

 Indian area would yield results second to none in im- 

 portance in clearing up the mysteries which surround the 

 working of atmospherical conditions. At that time the 

 " Indian Meteorological Memoirs," designed to embody 

 compilations and discussions of data in the spare time of 

 the hard-worked officials of the service, were only just 

 starting. 



Six portly volumes of these Memoirs have now been 

 completed since 1876 ; and, to judge from the character of 

 their contents, and the evident growth of certainty and 

 breadth of view with augmenting experience and improving 

 data, Mr. Blanford's prediction is being fulfilled even 

 more satisfactorily than he could have anticipated. 



In 1883 a series of articles, by Mr. Archibald, appeared 

 in Nature, in which vol. i., containing the first twelve 

 Memoirs, were reviewed at some length. Since that date 

 five more volumes have appeared, containing papers by 

 the late Mr. H. F. Blanford, F.R.S., Mr. Hill, of Alla- 

 habad, Mr. Frederick Chambers, Mr. John Eliot, F.R.S. 

 (the present head of the department), Mr. Dallas, and 

 Mr. Archibald. In some of these papers the phenomena 

 dealt with, such as hot winds and special storms, are of 

 purely local incidence. In others, conditions outside the 

 Indian area and their variations over a long course of 

 years are discussed. We shall in the present article 

 direct our attention principally to the light thrown upon 

 the latter in the more recent Memoirs. Before doing 

 this, however, allusion must be made to a very important 

 series of papers, which form a large proportion of these 

 volumes, in which the normal diurnal elements are dis- 

 cussed at twenty-five observatories scattered over the 

 entire Indian area. 



The adequate presentation of such normals is of vital 

 importance to the efficient work of the Meteorological 

 Department. To estimate an anomaly or abnormal, we 

 must manifestly be able to refer to a correct normal. 

 One of the points early foreseen by Mr. Blanford, and 

 continually insisted upon by his successor, Mr. Eliot, 

 has been the accurate determination of normals for as 

 many stations as possible over the Indian area. At 

 these twenty-five selected observatories, not merely 

 have the normal means been determined, but the diurnal 

 variations in temperature, pressure, wind, cloud, &c., 

 have been worked out most exhaustively with the guiding 

 aid of the harmonic formula, and the critical epochs 

 determined with no stint of labour by the aid of the 

 analytical process known as Jelinek's method of approxi- 

 mation. The series began with Sibsagar, by Mr. 

 Blanford, on June 16, 1882, and was completed by a 

 special monograph on Calcutta, by Mr. Douglas Archi- 

 bald, in the present year. The area represented by 

 these observatories extends in longitude from Aden to 

 Dhubri in Assam, and in latitude from Leh in Thibet to 

 Trichinopoly in Southern India. Many valuable points 

 in connection with diurnal variations have been deter- 

 mined and discussed ; and if ever the vexed problem of 

 the cause of the daily variation in atmospheric pressure 

 is completely solved, it will only be by the aid of this 

 valuable series of papers. 



In the Calcutta Memoir, which has only just reached 

 us, the discussion embraces the temperature, pressure, 

 and humidity observations, registered autographically 



