1904.] 0. Little — The Himalayan summer storm of Sept. 24th, 1903, 151 



The criticism of the Pioneer if just, makes it obligatory on some 

 one to revise presetit-day methods of meteorologists in India, and 

 cannot be entirely overlooked by even the most humble worker or 

 writer. I have given my opinion that any fault, there may have been, 

 cannot be laid at the door of the subordinates who were carrying on 

 the daily routine of weather reporting and forecasting. It must, there- 

 fore, have been the system that failed, and as that system is intimately 

 coimected with the subject of this and other papers which have been 

 read by me before this Society, I will pause for a brief reference to 

 that system. I may be permitted to point out that atmospheric prob- 

 lems, whether simple of their kind or complex, are of such unusual 

 difficulty, that their treatment must of necessity, in auy department 

 such as a Weather Bureau, be the special responsibility of tlie head of 

 the department ; and that the success or failure of a system, whether 

 in its bearing on past events, or as the basis of weather forecasting, is a 

 matter, from the point of view of science, of strictly personal reckon- 

 ing. On that ground I may be excused somewhat repeated reference in 

 the few general remarks that follow to Mr. Blanford and Sir J. Eliot, 

 who have controlled meteorological work ia India during the past 

 thirty to forty years. 



It requires only a cursory examination of the meteorological his- 

 tory of the early years of the department to realize, even in the light 

 of the accumulated experience of the intervening years, how sound was 

 the instinct displayed, and practical the view that was taken of the 

 possibilities of meteorological work in India by its founder, Mr. H. F. 

 Blanford of immortal memory. Nothing affords a more striking illustra- 

 tion of his power of separating what may be called casual occurrences, 

 or from those indicating important or controlling causes, than his 

 method of estimating the strength of the coming monsoon, and 

 theory has received more encouraging confirmation tlian his is receiving 

 at the present time, twenty years after it was formulated. That theory 

 has been given in published reports and in the Proceedings of the 

 Royal Society, and its distinctive feature is the connection between 

 the condition of the upper atmospheric strata as indicated by snowfall 

 in the Himalayas, and the character of the coming monsoon. The 

 following extracts are taken from his report on the Meteorology of 

 India in 1882:— 



*' In Europe and America, the attention of the leading Meteorolo- 

 gical Physicists would seem to have been concentrated of late 

 years mainly on the physics of the vortical movements of the 

 atmosphere of cyclones and anticyclones, the importance of 

 ■which is keenly felt, owing to the prominence given to storm 



