198 report — 1865. 



to say, are still sometimes) constantly quoted, and no notice was taken o 

 subsequent observations. This is the more to be regretted since some of the 

 gauges quoted by Dr. Dalton were on roofs, others on the ground, and no dis- 

 tinction was made between them. 



I am not at present aware of any extensive collection between 1799 and 

 1840, or thereabouts, when Mr. Joseph Atkinson, of Harraby near Carlisle, 

 published a rain-map of the British Isles : to my great vexation I cannot ob- 

 tain a copy ; and there is not one in the British Museum. It only gives the 

 mean fall, and contains only two or three places besides those I possess ; but 

 it is provoking that a copy of so recent a publication (1841 or 1842) cannot 

 be obtained. During the last ten or twenty years several collections have 

 been made, those of Mr. Glaisher for the British, and Dr. Stark for the Scot- 

 tish, Meteorological Society having been published, with other meteorological 

 details, quarterly by the Registrars-General of the respective countries. The 

 prize offered by the Marquis of Tweeddale for an essay on rainfall, and 

 awarded to Mr. Jamieson, of Ellon, led to the collection of the yearly fall at about 

 twenty British stations, and the collection in Mr. Beardmore's splendid ' Ma- 

 nual of Hydrology' completes the list of my precursors. The two last ha^e 

 been published since 1860, but it seems appropriate to notice them here : 

 the most copious of these Tables, however, did not contain a tenth of the ex- 

 istent observations. 



It is a singular fact, that, with the exception of the last two works, no notice 

 has ever been taken of the position of the gauges, on which so much depends 

 that a West-country roof record will often be less than an Eastern -counties 

 ground-record ; that is to say, the difference due to elevation is often greater 

 by far than that due to a hundred miles geographical distance. Paramount 

 as is the importance of distinct information on this point, it is never referred 

 to in any of the old or many modern Tables. 



This omission naturally leads me to refer to the variation in the amount 

 collected according to the height at which the gauge is placed above the sur- 

 face of the ground. This was first noticed in 1705 ; and in 1 766 Dr. Heberden, 

 F.R.S., placed a gauge on the square tower of Westminster Abbey, another on 

 the roof of an adjacent house, and a third in a garden, and found the fall to be, 

 — garden, 22-61 ; roof, 18-14; abbey-tower, 12-10. These experiments were 

 promptly repeated at "Bath, Liverpool, Middlcwich, and elsewhere;" but I 

 have not been able to find any notice beyond the simple fact that " the results 

 were similar to those at Westminster." (This shows how much is either still 

 buried, or lost altogether.) Shortly after this, the Hon. Daines Barrington 

 erected two gauges in the vicinity of Bala, in North Wales — one at Eennig, 

 and one on the summit of Bochyraidr (1700 feet?) — and ascertained therefrom 

 that the decrease did not depend on actual elevation, but on the height 

 above the surface of the ground. This subject, I need hardly remind mem- 

 bers of this Association, was carefully investigated by our esteemed President, 

 Professor Phillips, when living at York in 1832; in fact it was one of the 

 first subjects this Association took in hand. 



The heavy fall of rain in mountainous districts was noticed at a very 

 early period ; but very little was done, until a comparatively recent date, 

 towards systematic observation and the determination of the laws governing 

 the distribution of rain in mountainous districts. Mr. Bateman's observa- 

 tions in the Derbyshire and Yorkshire hills, followed as they were by the 

 elaborate investigations carried on by the late Dr. Miller in the Lake-dis- 

 trict, have left for future examination only the subsidiary and minor vari- 

 ations to which the laws they deduced are liable. 



