166 METEOROLOGICAL OBSERVATORIES. 



own and in foreign countries, and it may be permitted to throw a 

 glance from "the mind's eye" into the future and imagine an observa- 

 tory in Great Britain which shall more than rival those of other coun- 

 tries. One can figure to oneself a tower piercing the sky from any 

 of the elevated table-lands of this island, Salisbury Plain, the Stray at 

 Harrogate, or anywhere on the downs between Guildford and Dorking, 

 from which the most interesting results could not fail to accrue. It is 

 the opinion of M. Vallot — no mean authority — that a high tower is for 

 air-observing purposes equivalent to a mountain station of ten times 

 the altitude, and this is evident when one considers that any mountain 

 must act as an obstacle which thrusts the layers of the atmosphere 

 upward into a contour almost like its own, so that some of the effects 

 are very little different from those observed below. A tower like the 

 Eiffel Tower, on the contrary, thrusts itself into the air without imped- 

 ing its movements. 



Among the new subjects which might with advantage be studied 

 from such an observatory are the systematic photography of the clouds 

 all around the horizon and the effects of observed refraction in the 

 different air strata, a subject only yet in its infancy; for Mr. H. F. 

 bewail showed only last Friday to the Fellows of the Royal Astro- 

 nomical Society how he had observed, in the great telescope of Cam- 

 bridge, waves of a varying speed and frequency crossing each other at 

 different angles in the field of view when the telescope was pointed at 

 the open sky. He says these belong to the upper air 4 or 5 miles from 

 the earth, and if he is right (which I hope), here alone is a new field of 

 study which may be fruitful of results in the future. 1 



It is the boast of our society that it is covering the face of the coun- 

 try, and indeed of the world, with a network of private observing 

 stations, and it is collecting together for the enlightenment of all future 

 time a mass of accurate knowledge on the subject of the thousand 

 changes in our atmosphere, its varying moods, its beating pulses, its 

 calms and its convulsions, so that when the philosopher is born who is 

 destined to unravel all its mysteries he will find the means and instru- 

 ments made ready to his hand. 



1 The Observatory, 1896, p. 77. 



