148 THE WEATHER, AND WEATHER PROPHETS. 



into the service the great and recondite names of APO- 

 GEE and PERIGEE ; and professed to determine the char- 

 acter of the lunation from her proximity at new or full to 

 these mysterious points of her orbit. Both the one and 

 other rule utterly break down when brought to the tests 

 of long-continued and registered experience. Others, 

 again, drew their prognostic for the whole lunation from 

 the character of the weather during the first quarter. 

 Such was the rule said to have been implicitly adhered 

 to by the late Marshal Bugeaud in the planning of any 

 military expedition whose success was likely to be any 

 way dependent on weather : 



k " Primus, secundus, tcrtius, nullus, 



Quartus, aliquis, 

 Quintus, sextus, qualis ; 

 Tota Luna tails." 



(9.) 3dly, A more ambitious form of lunar prediction 

 was that of the late eminent meteorologist (for such, this 

 one crotchet excepted, he certainly was), Luke Howard ; 

 who took great account of the moon's declination as 

 influencing the averages of rainfall, and of the height of 

 the barometer. Still more so was his weather-cycle of 

 nineteen years, the period of the circulation of the nodes 

 of the moon's orbit ; in the course of which the absolute 

 maximum of north declination occurs when the ascending 

 node is in the spring equinox, and the moon 90 in 

 advance of the node in her orbit, and that of south in 

 the reversed circumstances the intermediate situations 

 of the node corresponding to the absolute minima of each. 

 These situations, according to the declination theory, 



