On Some Meatber portents 105 



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Whymper, in an account of one of his attempts on 

 the Matterhorn, states that when they reached Breuil 

 a halo round the moon promised " watery weather." 

 They were not disappointed, in that on the following 

 day rain fell heavily, and when the clouds lifted for 

 a time they saw that new snow lay thickly over every- 

 thing higher than 9000 ft. 



In Tasmania there is a correspondent Mr. H. 

 Stuart Dove to whom I am indebted for many 

 valued communications. During the past autumn he 

 wrote to me on the subject of lunar halos. In some 

 seasons, he said, he had seen a number of fine examples 

 of those phenomena, and his experience was that they 

 were almost invariable precursors of wind and rain, 

 although the halo was often 48, and sometimes even 

 60 hours ahead of the disturbance. An old friend of his, 

 Mr. J. Whitham, with some 50 years' experience in 

 England, Canada and Tasmania, had always found 

 the halo to be "a most reliable prophet of change." 



There is a belief, I find, that the number of stars 

 enclosed within a moon-ring represents in some way 

 the number of days the bad weather will continue. 

 That, however, is not borne out by observation. It 

 is evident that the visibility of the stars in the ring 

 depends, in the first place, upon the prevailing state 

 of the atmosphere, and, next, upon the moon's position 

 in the sky. With regard to the latter condition, it 

 must be obvious to most people that some regions of 

 the heavens through which our satellite passes in its 

 monthly round are much richer in bright stars than are 



