44 2 The National Geographic Magazine 



and it remains to assign the cause for 

 so great a decrease in the rainfall or 

 such other causes as may have combined 

 to produce these results. 



COMMERCIAL POSSIBILITIES 



The great need of the country is trans- 

 portation facilities. If a narrow-gauge 

 tramway was built connecting the in- 

 terior with the great waterways, Nigeria 

 might become one of the cotton- produc- 

 ing centers of the empire, and her great 

 population might afford a new and im- 

 portant market for the manufactured 

 cottons of Manchester. Without such 

 cheap transport, however, neither cotton 

 nor other agricultural or sylvan produce 

 can bear the cost of carriage from the in- 

 terior, where the bulk of the industrious 

 population live. 



The principal exports at present are 

 shea, rubber, palm kernels, ivory, gum 

 and wood oils. The imports are chiefly 

 cottons and salt, since liquor for sale to 

 the natives is entirely excluded. 



If a cheap form of transport was in- 

 troduced, the existing imports, at pres- 

 ent simply wasted for lack of transport, 

 might be almost indefinitely increased, 

 and many new products could be profit- 

 ably exploited. Prominently among the 

 latter would be cotton, for which there 

 is so great a demand in England and 

 which has been grown for 1,000 years 

 in the Hausa states. Minerals, too, will 

 soon become a profitable source of reve- 

 nue. The mines at Bauchi have proved 

 to be of the highest quality, and the}' 

 are now being exploited by the Niger 

 Company. 



The local industries and manufactures 

 are varied, and the products are often 

 of high excellence. The weavers of 

 Kano and the other great cities produce 

 admirable cloth, colored by the native 

 dyers with their own fast dyes. The 

 leather work is admirable, and the 

 tanned goat skins exported from Kano 

 across the desert to Morocco were the 

 original Morocco leather of commerce. 



SCIENTIFIC WORK OF MOUNT WEATHER 



METEOROLOGICAL RESEARCH 



OBSERVATORY* 



By Professor Frank H. Bigelow, U. S. Weather Bureau 



METEOROLOGY has for its field 

 of study the physics of the 

 earth's atmosphere. Since all 

 stellar and planetary atmospheres are 

 subject to similar laws, meteorology 

 properly is concerned with astrophysical 

 and solar physical problems as well as 

 with terrestrial atmospheric relations. 

 Cosmical meteorology may be used as a 

 term to designate the mutual relations be- 

 tween solar and terrestrial atmospheric 

 physics. The causes of the circulation 

 of the earth's atmosphere are intimately 



bound up with the causes of the circu- 

 lation of the sun's atmosphere. The 

 generation of the great cyclonic circu- 

 lation in the earth' s atmosphere covering 

 a hemisphere is due to the sun's radia- 

 tion falling upon the tropics, and the 

 tendency to return to a thermal equilib- 

 rium is accompanied by the production 

 of local cyclones and anticyclones in the 

 middle latitudes of the northern and 

 southern hemispheres. Similarly, the 

 sun's own circulation can be divided into 

 a general drift over the hemisphere and 



An address to the Eighth International Geographic Congress. 



