642 PROFESSOR PIAZZI SMYTH ON THE 
beginning of a higher Meteorology,—I sent up, in March 1870, a full account 
of the affair, with a copy of all the original observations for thirty-three years to 
the Royal Society, London. Unfortunately that learned Society had not then 
begun to perceive the bearing of Solar physics on variations of terrestrial 
climate, as, through a Committee, it is now professing to do, and is correspond- 
ing about with H.M. Government: so, in their then state of knowledge, they 
summarily extinguished my paper, and buried it out of sight. 
But no matter! For was I not freed thereby to print some of the 
originals of the Manuscripts, which I had fortunately preserved, in the next 
issuing volume of the Edinburgh Astronomical Observations, the thirteenth of 
the series, early in 1872? Of course I was ; and [also took that occasion to go 
further, and announce (see Appendix 4 to this paper), that the next very cold 
period would not take place until 1878°8,—~7.¢., near the end of the year 1878— 
and that the next bot period would occur in 1880! Making thus two distinct 
statements for critical and opposite kinds of weather in this country, and to 
an unheard of distance of time beforehand, to have any ordinary chance of 
success. | 
But having been permitted to live and publish that most crucial, double- 
headed conclusion in 1872, alas! that I had not died thereupon, and simply 
left those numbers behind me, pure, untouched and in all their integrity. For 
then, when those two dates, predicted so many years beforehand by one who 
was no longer in the way of troubling, no longer in rivalry with any one, 
should have come round,—and been found by a new race of scientists to be so 
remarkably close to the subsequently observed leading features of meteorology 
which followed,—better men than I would have rushed into the subject in 
crowds, and a whole new science might have been born in a day. 
But it was ordered that I should not die then and there ; but should live 
on; and after five years, stumble, and spoil everything by one unhappy slip ; 
for this is the dismal version of what ensued. 
Our hopes of future confirmations had been growing continually more 
precise with every additional year,—when suddenly, in the autumn of 1876, 
befell us that ever regretable calamity, of the mad-man climbing in the dawn of 
early morning over the dilapidated Observatory boundary wall, and smashing 
our staff of strength, the whole of our rock thermometers. After that loss, 
I knew no more of the march of earth-temperature, than any one else in the 
community ; and in my ignorance was blown hither and thither by vague sur- 
mises. So that when in 1877, one continental scientist announced that the 
then, and still the last, Sun-spot minimum occured in 1876°8, and another said 
1877°5,—I was wise enough to recoil from the former, but stupid enough to 
believe the latter, and act accordingly. For that latter date being a year earlier 
than what, in 1872, I had hypothetically taken for the next Solar-spot minimum, 
