DROUGHT 91 



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All who care for the recurrent signs of the times, for 

 symptoms of weather and season, must pay their tribute 

 from time to time to that international group of observers, 

 still in active function, who may be called the Apostles 

 of the Calendar. These students believe that by the 

 study of dates of appearance the budding of the quick, 

 the flowering of the blackthorn, the emergence of the 

 bat, the singing of the thrush, the laying of the robin, the 

 breeding of the fox they will be able to create a new 

 science, to discover hidden affinities and ensure safe 

 prognostications : when the farmer should sow, when 

 the fruit-grower should light his &quot;smudges,&quot; when it 

 is safe to &quot; drop a clout.&quot; The British members at any 

 rate, among these &quot; phenologists,&quot; must be of a hopeful 

 temperament* But who knows ! We may yet discover 

 why the dormouse obeys the calendar, but the pipistrelle 

 the thermometer; why the blackbird sings only in 

 spring and his cousins the thrushes all the year ; why the 

 hive bee is suicidal and bombus terrestris a master of 

 common sense ; why the daisy sees April in December, 

 but the bluebell waits for its proper month. Can it be 

 that January warmth is related to March dust, or to-day s 

 song prophetic of to-morrow s sun, or mood a product 

 of astronomy ? Perhaps, but it is a peradventure that, if 

 solved, will be solved last in England. Yet all our villa 

 gers are phenologists. They remember with unblemished 

 accuracy exactly what occurred in what date last year or 

 even a generation ago. The storm of 1916, the drought 

 of 1 92 1 , remain vivid events ; and tradition holds particular 

 records of wheat cut and carried in July in the early fifties 

 and rivers frozen over in a night in 1861. And they be 

 lieve in the prognostic anticipations of their doggerel seers . 



