Nok's and Comments. 289 



in the newspapers. There is no journalist, however young-, who 

 has not flung- a gibe at the " Clerk of the Weather," and there is 

 no crank who has not at one time or another intimated that he 

 knows how to predict the weather a g-reat deal better than 

 people who are paid to do it. There is no cure for the journa- 

 list but experience, and no cure for the meteorological faddist 

 but the study of meteorological facts, and the meteorological 

 faddist always refrains from that study. But you can cieate 

 an instructed public opinion which will be able to give intelli- 

 gent criticism to the predictions that are given out, and once 

 the Meteorological Office feels that the predictions are subject 

 to intelligent criticism it will be a stimulus that will help the 

 heads of the Office, who are doing the best they can, to do still 

 better, and will result, I am confident, in a very great 

 improvement.' 



METEOROLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS. 



Dr. Mill would like to see in every town of importance in 

 the British Isles — 'and in every town that thinks itself impor- 

 tant ' — a meteorological station kept up under the watchful 

 care of a scientific society, which would not allow a record to 

 be modified to boom the place as a health resort, and which 

 would not show a temperature always above the average and 

 the rainfall below it, as he had sometimes suspected — but whose 

 record of sunshine would never exceed the number of hours the 

 sun is above the horizon. Such a society, he suggested, should 

 forward observations to one of the central authorities specially 

 devoted to the study of meteorology. 



Urging the need of additional observations in regard to 

 sunshine, Dr. Mill remarked that we knew deplorably little 

 about the sunshine of this country. There were very few places 

 where we could tell with approximate exactitude what the 

 sunshine of a place was. One result of more observations 

 would be that we should find that this country is far sunnier 

 than we supposed. It was desirable to put sunshine recorders 

 in a few hundred places where they do not now exist. More 

 observations of rainfall were also needed. There are more than 

 four thousand observers of rainfall in the British Isles, but still, 

 thinks Dr. Mill, there are not enough. There are not a quarter 

 enough rain gauges in the East and North Ridings of York- 

 shire, though the West Riding, and particularly the western 

 part of it, is well represented. 



1906 September i. 



