200 A yeae's weather. 



July 2-60-ins 3-67-iiis r62-ms. 



August 3'01-ins 3-79-ins 6-48-ins. 



September... 3-49-ins 2-63-ms 303-ins. 



October 4-81-ins 3-02-ins 8-55-ins. 



Total ... 32-50-m 35-68-ins 34-80-ms. 



Five and a half inches more rain this October than last ; 

 three and three-quarters inches more than the average, and a gradual 

 overtaking of the wet year 1890. The gales were in many cases 

 accompanied by storms of hail, and thunder was not uncommon. 

 On one such night, October 5th, I went down Malpas Road, Truro, 

 when we had a high tide in the river, and the whole of the water 

 was overspread with a phosphorescent light. As the gusty wind 

 caught the water and blew it on as an ever-increasing wave, a fire 

 roll started where the first puff caught the surface, and registered 

 the growing wave in fire. It was a magnificent sight, for the waves 

 broke on the shore in fi.re flashes, and the spray, seized at times by 

 the fiercer gusts, was blown into the adjoining fields as fire dust. 

 This phosphorescence was due to animal organisms, Noctiluca, and 

 other lowly forms of life, and was emitted from the outer layer of the 

 protoplasmic contents of the body j and as we witnessed the vital 

 energy of the organisms transformed into a radiant form, we seemed 

 to be in touch with the latest ideas in hght studies, that light is an 

 electric phenomenon, and that vibrations of light are electric vibra- 

 tions. Probably each of those countless millions of organisms was a 

 battery evolving light, and not chemically working in oxidising tissue. 



There has been a general complaint that the wet weather has 

 robbed us of our autumnal glow. My experience has been a 

 generally noticeable greenness on the leaves to the end of the month, 

 and a magnificent display in our southern Cornish woods of soft 

 greens, yellows, and ruddy tints. In travelling one noticed this as 

 particularly intense about Truro, Liskeard, and in the coombes 

 eastward, in South Devon a loss of this effectiveness, and then a 

 re-growth in beauty in North Devon and Somerset, especially in the 

 Vale of Avon. Of course, where frost catches the wet leaves there 

 is little chance of that persistency necessary for the plant contents 

 to change in the leaves, as the frost sheds them in showers of gold. 

 In one short stroll of about two miles out of Truro, I noticed in the 

 last week in October over forty kinds of plants in flower, and we 

 had in our hedgerows many more blooms than we had in 



