PERIODICITY OF GOOD AND BAD SEASONS. 75 
the nineteen years’ cycle was the question which naturally 
occurred to me? And it was seen that it did, for 19 x 43 takes us 
back from 1838 to 1021, that is, to a repetition of D drought, 
and on the spur of the moment the differences of opinion about 
the accuracy of B.C. dates was ignored and the figures were run 
out to see if the seven years famine in Egypt 1708 B.C. was in 
one of our nineteen years’ cycles, and sure enough 19 x 186 + 2 takes 
us back to 1708 B.C., that is exactly the date of Pharaoh’s famine; 
but Pharaoh’s drought may for the present be discarded to 
appear again later; the fact that one famine in 1022, when dates 
may be taken to be reliable, should fall into the cycle was enough 
to suggest further investigation in reference to other recorded 
droughts, and all the records of droughts that had been collected 
in the last twenty years of general reading were tested to see if 
they fitted in. Tables were prepared showing every date on 
which A drought recurred back to A.D. 1, and the same for 
drought D. Iam not going to weary you by going through the 
list,’ but will give you the result.. History says very little about 
droughts prior to A.D. 900, between that date and this, A drought 
has, on the assumption, occurred at every nineteen years. In 
this interval of nine hundred and ninety-six years there have 
been fifty-two repetitions of A drought, and the question is,,.what 
has history to say about its droughts. Well, it shows that these 
droughts have been repeated at various places on the earth on 
forty-four of the fifty-two dates ; of these eight missing droughts, 
no less than six of them occurred between 1100 and 900 A.D., an 
interval when history was less complete on these matters. So far 
as I have gone history furnishes us with seventy-eight droughts in 
different countries, all of which fit into the series which we have 
named A. During the same period, D recurred fifty-one times, 
and history records droughts, numbering eighty-nine, on thirty-six 
of these periods. Taking then the droughts history has recorded 
- between A.D. 900 and 1896 we have seventy-eight A, and eighty_ 
nine D, a total of one hundred and sixty-seven, out of two hundred 
1 Appendix No. 1. 
