PART in. THE CYCLE OF A YEAR. 15 



travellers. Time has now, however, pronounced so 

 decidedly in favour of the dry and wet bulb thermometer 

 with rain-water, as the only practical hygrometer for all 

 international observers, that if the contest respecting 

 whose name it shall be called by is destined to be re- 

 opened, Dr. Mason's claims can hardly but be mentioned 

 in any essay on Madeira, where he used it so early and 

 so well. Where, notwithstanding his deadly illness at 

 the time, he took up the abstract principle, as discovered, 

 and let alone, by others before his day ; and both practi- 

 calised the idea and turned it into an every-day working 

 hygrometer for himself as well as others. 



Yet he made few friends by it in his own day ; and 

 even fifteen years after his death, a Madeiran writer can 

 speak thus carpingly of him : " The late Dr. Mason, in 

 his treatise on the Climate and Meteorology of Madeira, 

 appears to have detected a greater degree of moisture in 

 the atmosphere around Funchal than is shown by the 

 tables of other observers ; and, while writing under the 

 morbid influence of active disease, complained bitterly 

 of the cloudy sky, the high winds, and the variability of 

 temperature encountered in Madeira." 



But that too truly active disease under which he did 

 then undoubtedly labour, appears to me to have rather 

 made him a more acute and delicate observer than most 

 men ; while it is to the ineffable praise of his soul, that 

 his spirit did so rise superior to the weakness of his body 

 as to enable him to follow up his voluntary scientific 



