1890.] The Modern Weather Bureau. 25 



circumstances. Under his hands the Signal Service is entering upon 

 a new career ; it has become even more decidedly a mixed military and 

 civil organization, thereby responding to the evident desire of the 

 people and of Congress. He has also succeeded in accomplishing a 

 considerable reduction in the annual expenses of the office. Counting 

 upon our long experience in the study of weather maps made up three 

 times a day, namely, for 7 a.m., 3 p.m., and 11 p.m., he has made the 

 experiment of diminishing the number of reports and maps, and our 

 predictions are now based on two complete maps per day, namely, for 

 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. 



But the history of the Signal Service will perhaps not interest you: 

 so much as an account of the preparation of the weather maps and 

 predictions. I have exhibited upon the wall a series of the large 7 a.m. 

 weather maps as published every day at 11 a.m., and which maps can 

 be consulted here at any time in the archives of your Meteorological 

 Commission. A series of such maps is a rarity even in the United 

 States, and I hope the duplicate copies received by your Commission 

 will stimulate some one in Cape Town to study American weather, at 

 least as faithfully as Americans would be glad to study Cape Town 

 weather. Our observers have their stations located in the large 

 cities near the telegraph offices, and frequently on the tops of our 

 highest buildings, so that some of them are from 100 to 150 feet 

 above the ground. The morning observations that you see on these 

 charts were made simultaneously at Greenwich noon, which corre- 

 sponds to 7 a.m. by the clocks used throughout our Atlantic States, 

 and to 4/00 a.m. by the clocks used throughout the Pacific States, for 

 you must know that in October, 1884, our innumerable railroads lifted 

 from us the great burden and bugbear of "Mean Local Time," 

 and gave to each section of the country a simple system of Standard 

 Meridians at the successive whole hours of longitude west of Green- 

 wich, to the great advantage of the public and the railroads. This is 

 also a great boon to terrestial physics, since now whenever any one 

 reports to us an observation of a meteor, an earthquake, an aurora, or 

 a tornado, we easily find what standard time he used and the probable 

 relation of his own to other observations. It was the hopeless im- 

 possibility of properly co-ordinating the observations of our voluntary 

 observers that led me, while studying the aurora of 1874, to propose this 

 simple system and subsequently to Avrite the report published in the 

 " Transactions of the American Meteorological Society " which report 

 in the hands of the general superintendent of our railroad time service 

 (Mr. H. A. Allen) enabled him to hopefully and successfully renew his 

 efforts to bring about this great reform in our domestic clocks. At 

 present the mean time of the 75th Meridian is that used in all Signal 

 Service work and is the official standard of the Government at 



