159 



WEATHER ALMANACS. 



NOTE. The subject of weather almanacs having occasionally been introduced in an abridged 

 fo.-m in my lectures, I have thoueht it best to give it here in the form in which I originally presented 

 ; in London, when a rage for this sort of scientific charlatanism prevailed in an extraordinary de- 

 gree. The following appeared in the spring of if 38. 



IF the weather almanacs presented no other claims to our attention than 

 those which rest upon their intrinsic importance, they would assuredly never 

 have been noticed by us. We should as soon think of discussing their merits 

 among our scientific discourses, as of reviewing the performances of the 

 penny theatres, or the buffoonery of the booths at Bartholomew fair. When, 

 however, we are told that the circulation of some of these publications is 

 reckoned by hundreds of thousands, and that at a price which would im- 

 pose a narrow limit on the sale on any ordinary brochure of equal bulk 

 and when we know, as we do, that this enormous circulation is not either 

 exclusively or principally confined to the lower and less-informed clas- 

 ses, but extends to those who are, or ought to be, the best educated and most 

 enlightened we feel that, however much beneath scientific criticism such 

 productions may be, they have acquired some claims to attention from the suc- 

 cess with which they have wrought upon the credulity of the " most thinking 

 people" in the world. 



It is astonishing, in this age of the diffusion of knowledge, how susceptible 

 the public mind is of excitement on any topic, the principles of which do not 

 lie absolutely on the surface of the most ordinary course of elementary educa- 

 tion. It was only in the year 1832 that a general alarm spread throughout 

 France, lest Biela's comet, in its progress through the solar system, should 

 strike the earth ; and the authorities in that country, with a view to tranquillize 

 the public, induced M. Arago, the astronomer royal, to publish an essay on 

 comets, written in a familiar and intelligible style, to show the impossibility 

 of such an event. 



Several panics in England, connected with physical questions, have oc- 

 curred within our memory. There prevailed in London a " water panic," during 



