14 



a meteorologist. Meteorology promises some happy results 

 for agriculture hereafter." 



The seventh question asked was, " Would farmers be bene- 

 fited by these forecasts and frost warnings if they were 

 received from twelve to twenty-four hours in advance ? " The 

 correspondents are practically unanimous in answering yes to 

 this question, A few state that they do not think anything 

 would be gained, and some fear that the accuracy of the fore- 

 casts would suffer if made so long in advance. The thing 

 needed is to make the forecasts accurate, if possible, and get 

 them before the farmers seasonably. An experiment is now 

 being tried in Maine with a system of signals using balls 

 instead of flags, and it is hoped that the results will be 

 gratifying. The following article, prepared for us by the 

 Director of the New England Weather Service, will give an 

 idea of what is needed and what the weather people are 

 trying to do : — 



Weather Signal Display in the Agricultural Districts, 

 With the transfer of the Weather Bureau to the Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture, which took place last year, the express 

 purpose of Congress was to extend the benefits of the 

 Weather Bureau more completely into the agricultural sec- 

 tions. The advantages derived from the Bureau are many 

 and so well established that it is not necessary to enumerate 

 them here. One of the most important is the daily weather 

 forecasts, which are now made from twenty-eight to thirty- 

 six hours in advance. Many methods are used to put these 

 before the public at the earliest possible time. No news- 

 paper is now complete without its " weather indications," 

 and the corner where they may be found is one of the 

 first places scanned when the morning paper is picked 

 up ; but, while the newspaper is a very good medium for 

 disseminating the information in the towns and villages, it 

 unfortunately does not reach a majority of the farmers with 

 sufiicient promptness to be of material advantage to them, 

 especially during the crop season. 



Other methods must be employed to reach them, and the 

 Bureau has been telegraphing the forecasts direct to any 

 town or farmino- section wherever the information is desired, 



