XIII. 

 INDIAN METEOROLOGY. 



The Indian Meteorological Department was officially established 

 by the Order of the Government of India, in the Department of 

 Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce, No. 56 of the 27th 

 September 1875. A few months before that, Mr. H. F. Blanford, 

 F.R.S., the Reporter and head of the Department, had made a tour 

 through Berar, the Central and the North -West Provinces, Oudh, the 

 Punjab, Bengal, and subsequently the Madras Presidency and the 

 Nizam's dominions, visiting the principal observatories, and taking- 

 steps to supply stations with instruments in which they were 

 deficient, to get all the barometers satisfactorily compared, and to 

 obtain trustworthy determinations of the elevations of the instru- 

 ments above sea-level. 



At the time of the establishment of the Department there were 

 84 observatories in India and its dependencies (exclusive of Ceylon). 

 Two of these (a private observatoi'y at Vizagapatam, and one 

 established by the Portuguese Government at Goa) were inde- 

 pendent of the British Government ; eight were under special 

 superintendents, or attached to special Government departments, 

 and 74 were administered by local meteorological reporters or by 

 the provincial sanitary commissioners. The observatories were 

 very unequally distributed, being somewhat overcrowded in the 

 alluvial Sub-Himalayan plain, and unduly sparse over the whole of 

 Western India and some parts of the peninsula. But much valuable 

 information on the meteorology of the country might, nevertheless, 

 have been gathered from them, had the resulting data been com- 

 parable and accessible to persons in other presidencies. 



Neither of these conditions were fulfilled, however, except 

 partially and very imperfectly, and up to 1876 it had been 

 impossible to collect and utilise the registers for discussing the 

 meteorology of India as a whole. 



