WEATHER PROGNOSTICS. 



sufficiently so to furnish probable grounds for conjecture as to 

 certain changes of the weather. 



But even before analogies of this kind could have furnished 

 much ground for reasoning, and when the heavenly bodies must 

 have been regarded more as signs than causes, meteorological 

 phenomena were connected with them by popular observation. 

 The influence of climate on all the interests of a people in a 

 pastoral, and subsequently in an agricultural state, is obvious ; 

 and accordingly we find weather prognostics coming down by 

 tradition from the most remote antiquity. By a course, 

 however, contrary to most other subjects of observation and 

 inquiry, this was corrupted rather than improved with the 

 progress of knowledge and civilisation ; and what was once a 

 mere system of signs of a certain present state of the atmosphere, 

 indicating certain approaching changes, was, by the craving oi 

 philosophy after the relations of cause and effect, converted into 

 the most absurd system of rules, having no foundation in nature, 

 never fulfilled by the phenomena except fortuitously, and 

 maintaining their ascendancy by the unbounded credulity of 

 mankind. 



The truth is, that the ancient prognostics, whether derived 

 from the moon, from the sun, or from the stars, were, in the first 

 instance, used legitimately as mere indications of the state of the 

 atmosphere by persons too simple-minded and uneducated to 

 trouble themselves much with the philosophy of cause and 

 effect ; but when these appearances came into the hands of 

 philosophers, they were at once elevated to the rank of physical 

 causes, and their dominion extended in proportion to the dignity 

 and importance thus conferred upon them. Such notions were 

 in keeping with a philosophy which made the moon the boundary 

 between corruption, change, and passiveness, on the one hand, 

 and the active powers of nature on the other. "Thus," 

 says Horsley, "the uncertain conclusions of an ill-conducted 

 analogy, and false metaphysics, were mixed with a few simple 

 precepts, derived from observation, which probably made the 

 whole of the science of prognostication in its earliest and purest 

 state." 



Although from age to age the particular circumstances and 

 appearances connected with the moon, by which the atmospheric 

 vicissitudes were prognosticated, were changed, still the faith of 

 mankind in general in her influence on the weather has never 

 been shaken ; and even in the present day, when knowledge is 

 so widely diffused, and physical science brought, as it were, to 

 the doors of all who have the slightest pretension to education, 

 this belief is almost universal. Many, it is true, may discard 

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