PERIODICITY OF GUOD AND BAD SEASONS. 89 
It thus appears that good years precede and follow great 
droughts in the cycle, and while D carrys its heat and its winds 
with it. The 1893 series carries its floods and its low temperatures. 
I have thus endeavoured to put before you some of the reasons 
which have convinced me that there is a cycle in weather, but the 
necessity for brevity in order to keep the proof within the limits 
of one address, has rendered it necessary to express in a few 
sentences the results of many separate investigations, and the 
evidence does not seem so strong when thus condensed, as it 
does when a number of facts one by one are brought to light 
from diverse sources, all of which individually support the 
proposition. I can assure you that the evidence was far more 
convincing when taken in detail, but want of time to get these 
details into one address, make this course impossible. Enough 
appears to have been said to prove that the cycle does exist, and 
to show you the very great importance of this re-discovery of a 
law of climate, which, there are many reasons to think was well- 
known to the Jews, the Egyptians, and other ancient peoples ; 
they at least knew how to forecast droughts successfully, and 
in Egypt, like sensible people made provision for them. 
We have in the diagram, the weather of one hundred and eight 
years of New South Wales Climate, arranged in order of date (the 
intensity being for the time overlooked); the black spaces above 
the line represent the good years, while the red spaces below the 
line represent the bad years. It is evident upon inspection that 
certain features of it recur every nineteen years; we have seen 
that the droughts of history, the great and conspicuous droughts 
I mean, all drop into this same cycle: both those that happened 
before the birth of Christ and those that have occurred in our era. 
We have seen that great hurricanes, the great frosts of history, 
all the red rains, and all the droughts that history records, witha 
very fow exceptions, are likewise included in this cycle, and that 
- sie of great lakes in Palestine, South America, and New 
__ South Wales, are subject to the same mysterious influence that ae 
