1921.] The Eighth Indian Sctence Congress. cxv 
their actual inversions show the superposition of air-currents 
which arrive often from very different sources. In none of 
these has the stratosphere been reached: it lies probably very 
high above Agra, as high perhaps, in the hot weather and 
monsoon as it does above the Equator, and our financial means 
have not admitted of touching it. In the cold weather, when 
the stratosphere might be accessible at less cost, the upper 
winds are so strong that instruments sent up to enter it would 
come down in Burma or Assam, and never be retrieved. 
26. Mention has been made of the question of expense, 
but it is not to be inferred that with more money available, 
frequent occasion would be taken to reach the stratosphere : 
there are immediate and pressing needs lower down which would 
receive prior attention, and at present have to be neglected 
from want of means. 
Very differently is the matter of expense considered in other 
countries. Germany, perhaps the thriftiest of European na- 
tions, has se strongly reco 
upper-air research that for the last 20 or 25 years most liberal 
Government funds have been devoted to it, and in 1907, it was 
even thought worth while to equip a costly expedition to the 
Victoria Nyanza for experimental balloon work in German East 
Africa. 
7. Indiaisa country with more strongly marked meteoro- 
logical features than any other perhaps in the world, and the 
solution of its rainfall problems is a matter of life and death to 
the Indian ryot: for scarcity is of yearly occurrence in some 
in wait for the ryot. Both scarcity and famine will have lost 
most of their terrors when we have reliable foreknowledge of a 
failing monsoon in regard to its geographical incidence, for 
timely remedial measures will then be possible. Bui, —there is 
obtain with all possible speed the power to forecast the Indian 
‘rains, both in the monsoon and in the cold weather, and accu- 
rately to foresee local disaster : the methods I have described 
will materially advance this purpose. 2 
Were the ryot allowed to contribute, now, one-thirtieth 
of one anna per head for experimental work upon these problems, 
real activity would be possible, and who would then venture 
to say that in a few years’ time the problems might not be 
solved ? At our present rates of working, the ryots’ contribu- 
tion for settlement of these vital matters takes no less than 
some twenty years to amount to that one-thirtieth of one anna 
per head. We are doing all that is possible in the circumstances 
