100 The Weather. 



to be implicitly trusted. — The same, painter anonymous, in- 

 scribed "Ano Dni. 1582, iEtatis suae 28." Avery unpre- 

 possessing portrait, and unlike the accepted head of Sidney. 

 The hair here is black, or at any rate very dark, and the cast 

 of features the reverse of aquiline. 



A Lady, in the costume of the early part of Queen Elizabeth's 

 reign, by Zucchero. Oil. Admirable. 



Lord Hunsdon, by Hilliard, 1605, Cousin and Master of 

 the Horse to Queen Elizabeth. An admirable example of the 

 style of this golden period of the miniature art. 



(To be continued.) 



THE WEATHER. 



BY A. S. HERSCHEL, B.A. 



" Changeable as the weather," " fickle as the wind," are pro- 

 verbs whose truth is confirmed in so many instances that no me- 

 teorologist will venture to deny them. To interpret the frowns 

 of the weather, and to predict its storms, is at best his thankless 

 task ; but to trace its fundamental laws to all their irrevocable 

 conclusions evidently transcends the powers of human thought. 

 The laws themselves are not many, nor difficult to understand, 

 but the immense diversity of circumstances under which, they 

 are applied, makes it impossible to follow them out to their 

 •actual results. An outline only of the general laws can be 

 presented, and every reader of the Intellectual Observer will 

 doubtless be able to add some jot or tittle to the store. 



Torricelli, a friend and intimate of Galileo, who flourished 

 about the middle of the seventeenth century, discovered that 

 the earth, and its envelope the air, are surrounded by a va- 

 cuum. This, which, is called the " Torricellian vacuum," is 

 imitated whenever water is attempted to be raised by suction 

 to a height exceeding thirty-three feet. The celebrated 

 experiment of Torricelli was to show that the same vacuum 

 is produced when mercury is attempted to be raised by suction 

 in a tube to a greater height than thirty inches. In fact, in 

 either of the two supposed cases, the air and the water, or the 

 air and the mercury, balance each other by their unassisted 

 weight, and the height of the atmosphere is made known by 

 the height of the column of the fluid. 



The height of a column of mercury at freezing temperature, 

 which balances the average weight of the atmosphere at the 

 sea-level at Greenwich, is 29*953 inches. Thirty inches of 



