rKEiSIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 5b6 



Shy, Antonio is a good man ? 



Bas. Have you heard any imputation to the contrary ? 



Shy. Oh ! no, no, no, no. ... Yet his means are in supposition : he 

 Lath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies ; I understand more- 

 over, upon the Rialtfi, that he hath a third in Mexico, a fourth for England, 

 and other ventures lie hath squandered abroad. But ships are but boardt*, 

 sailors but men. There is the peril of water, winds, and rocks. . . . Three 

 thousand ducats. 



"\Ve at the Meteorological OlTice are very mucli In Antonio's position. Our 

 means of research are very much in supposition : lour observatories and over 

 four hundred stations of one sort or another in the British Isles ; an elaborate 

 installation of wind-measuring apparatus at Holyhead ; besides other ventures 

 squandered abroad ; an anemometer at Gibraltar, another at St. Helena; a sun- 

 shine recorder at the Falkland Isles, half a dozen sets of instruments in British 

 New Guinea, and a couple of hundred on the wide sea. The efforts seem so 

 disconnected that the rumination about the ducats is not unnatural. 



And you must remember that we lack an inestimable advantage that belongs 

 to a physical laboratory or a school of mathematics, where the question 

 of the equivalent number of ducats does not arise in quite the same way. 

 The relative disadvantage that I speak of is that in an office the allowance 

 for the use of time and material in practice and training disappears. All the 

 world seems to agree that time or money spent on teaching or learning is well 

 spent. In the course of twenty years' experience at a physical laboratory, and in 

 examinations not a few, I have seen /|ft and lb or the wave length of sodium 

 light determined in ways that would earn very few ducats on the principle of 

 payment by results ; but, having regard to the psychological etlect upon the 

 culprit or the examiner, the question of ducats never came in. Wisely or 

 unwisely public opinion has been educated to regard the psychological effect as 

 of infinite value compared with the immediate result obtained. Bat in an office 

 the marks that an observer or computer gets for showing that he ' knew how to 

 do it,' when he did not succeed in doing it, do not count towards a 'first class,' 

 and we have to abide by what we do ; we cannot rely on what we might have 

 done. Consequently our means in supposition, spread over sea and land, are 

 matters of real solicitude. In such circumstances there might be reason for 

 despondency if one were dependent merely upon one's own ventures and the 

 results achieved thereby. But when one has the advantage of the gradual 

 development of investigations of long standing, it is possible to maintain a show 

 of cheerfulness. When Shylock demands his pound of tiesh in the form of an 

 annual report, it is not at all uncommon to find that some argosy that started on 

 its voyage long ago ' hath richly come to harbour suddenly.' There have been 

 quite a number of such happy arrivals within the last few years. 



I will refer quite briefly to the interesting relations between the yield of 

 barley and cool summers, or the yield of wheat and dry autumns, and the ante- 

 cedent yield of eleven years before, which fell out of the body of statistics 

 collected in the Weekly Weather Report since 1878. The accomplished statis- 

 ticians of the Board of Agriculture have made this work the starting-point for 

 a general investigation of the relation between the weather and the crops, which 

 cannot fail to have important practical bearings. 



Let me take another example. For more than a full generation meteoro- 

 logical work has been hampered by the want of a definite understanding as to the 

 real meaning in velocity, or force, of the various points of the scale of wind- 

 estimates laid down in 1805 by Admiral Beaufort for use at sea, and still handed 

 on as an oral tradition. The prolonged inquiry, which goes back really to the 

 report upon the Beckley anemograph already referred to, issued quite unexpectedly 

 in the simple result that the curve 



J} = -010553 



(wliere p is the force in pounds per square foot, and B the arbitrary Beaufort 

 number) runs practically through nine out of the eleven points on a dingrani 



