428 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



SOME WEATHER PROVERBS AND THEIR JUSTIFICATION 



By W. J. HUMPHREYS, Ph.D. 



PROFESSOR OF METEOROLOGICAL PHYSICS, U. S. WEATHER BUREAU 



"So it falls that all men are 

 With fine weather happier far." 



— King Alfred. 



THIS thousand-year-old observation by England's wisest ruler rec- 

 ognizes the fact that fine weather induces good tempers, and 

 therefore amply justifies the proverb that shrewdly bids one " Do busi- 

 ness with men when the wind is in the northwest." 



But this effect on the minds of men does not exhaust the good and 

 the evil of weather conditions, since our comfort, our convenience and 

 even the success or failure of whatever we undertake, all depend, in 

 large measure, upon clear skies and cloudy, upon wind and rain, and 

 upon everything that renders the elements fair or foul. 



Because, then, of the great influence weather conditions have over 

 human affairs numerous rules for foretelling their coming changes 

 have been formulated in all ages and by all peoples. While many of 

 these rules are of general application, many others, as miglit be sus- 

 pected, have only a local value, and owe their justification to some 

 peculiar configuration of mountain and valley, or distribution of land 

 and water, and, therefore, when transferred to other places commonly 

 are meaningless, if not even misleading. Nevertheless, all of them, the 

 wise and the silly, the good and the bad, have been inherited alike from 

 the ends of the earth ; and in this way many a concise saying has become 

 a weather nugget in that great vein of wisdom and folly called folk lore. 



Some of these nuggets are as pure gold, for they correctly state the 

 actual order of sequence, as determined by innumerable observations, 

 even when the cause for such an order was not in the least understood 

 by those who discovered it; but most of them are as only fools' gold, 

 pretty in form, but wholly deceptive. To this latter class belong hun- 

 dreds of proverbs of the ground-hog and goose-bone type: some owing 

 their origin to one thing and some to another, but, like predictions 

 based upon the weather of saints' days, or upon the phase of the moon 

 and the pointing of its horns, never for a moment accepted by those 

 whose reason demands an adequate cause for every effect. 



But that other class of weather proverbs, those that do have more 

 or less to support them, is worthy of very careful consideration and 

 study, for they embody accurate descriptions of phenomena and express 

 the usual sequence of events. 



