74 H. I. JENSEN. 



in England are often coincident with times of drought in 

 Australia. Yet a large number of German meteorologists, 

 and Mr. Alex. J. McDowall amongst English meteorologists 

 still think, not without a large amount of evidence in their 

 favour, that sunspot maxima are usually accompanied by 

 wet years and sunspot minima by dry years. It is an indis- 

 putable fact that many of the periods of great seismic 

 frequency and volcanic activity coinciding with sunspot 

 minima during the past century, were at the same time 

 periods of drought, famine and great winter cold, with red 

 rain, grey rain, fireballs and other concomitants of such 

 seasons. The work of Dr. Lockyer and Mr. H. 0. Russell 

 does, at the most, show us that periodic forecasts of good 

 and bad seasons cannot be made on sunspot data alone, but 

 that other potent causes are at work to modify sunspot 

 influence. 



Perhaps, indeed, Mr. Russell's " Nineteen Year Cycle " exerts 

 a modifying influence causing the rains at one time to preponderate 

 in the southern, at another in the northern hemisphere. Certainly 

 lunar influence is not negligiWle in seasonal weather forecasting. 

 A Russian meteorologist M. Demchinski, is at present becoming 

 quite famous through successful forecasts based on lunar data. 



Yet surely it is no mere coincidence that 1811-1812, 

 1844-1846, 1864-1869 and 1896-1902, were years of 

 drought in the greater part of the world, and at the same 

 time periods of sunspot minimum. In 1902 the Nile flood 

 was the lowest on record ; the Argentine, India, Russia and 

 parts of North America suffered very severely from drought, 

 though Australia, on account of its peculiar physiographical 

 nature, suffered most. The period from 1896 to 1900 was 

 also very dry in England, and the year 1901 was exception- 

 ally dry in Siberia as well as in the above mentioned regions. 



Mr. John Foster Frazer writes in the autumn of 1901, as follows: 

 "Old Siberians told me that as long as they could remember, 





