272 



Anniversary Meeting, 



[Nov. 30, 



his Report to the Government of the United States, by whom he had been 

 appointed to visit the principal European Meteorological Observatories for 

 the express purpose of urging a uniformity of procedure. 



" I would recommend that the United States should abandon, for the 

 time at least, that part of the * Universal System ' which relates to the 

 Land, and that we should direct our efforts mainly to the Sea, where there 

 is such a rich harvest to be gathered for navigation and commerce. I am 

 inclined to make this recommendation in consequence of the evident reluct- 

 ance with which Russia, Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, and other powers 

 seem to regard any change in their systems of meteorological observations 

 on shore. Each country seems to have adopted a system of its own, 

 according to which its labourers have been accustomed to work, and to 

 which its meteorologists are more or less partial. Any proposition having in 

 view for these systems a change so radical as to bring them into miiformity, 

 and reduce them to one for all the world would, I have reason to believe, be 

 regarded with more or less jealousy by many, — not so, however, with regard 

 to the sea ; that proposal meets with decided favour and warm support." 



The most hopeful way of removing the difficulties which impeded the 

 adoption of a system in which all might willingly unite was obviously the 

 introduction of instruments which should be continuously self-recording, 

 and which, after sufficient trial, should receive general approval. The 

 importance of such a substitution had been recognized at the Observatory 

 of the British Association at Kew at a very early date, even before the 

 Cambridge Meeting of the British Association in 1845 ; and at that meet- 

 ing the satisfactory performance was announced of a photometrically self- 

 recording barometer, self-compensated also for temperature, devised by 

 Mr. Francis Ronalds, the Honorary Director of the Kew Observatory,— the 

 same to whose merits in regard to the instantaneous transmission of mes- 

 sages by means of electricity, at the very early date of 1823, attention has 

 been recently called in the public journals. Encouraged by this success in 

 one instrument, the Directors of the Kew Observatory proceeded, as rapidly 

 as the means at their disposal enabled them to do, towards the provision of 

 self-recording instruments for the other meteorological elements (as well 

 as for the magnetical elements), and were considerably advanced in their 

 preparations when in 1854 the Board of Trade informed the President and 

 Council that, in fulfilment of a previous earnest recommendation to that 

 effect from the Royal Society, they were " about to submit to Parliament an 

 estimate for an office for the discussion of observations on meteorology made 

 at sea in all parts of the globe;" adding that, as it may possibly happen 

 that observations on Land upon an extensive scale may hereafter be made 

 and discussed in the same office, it is desirable that the Royal Society should 

 keep in view and provide for such a contingency." 



The subject of a Government system of Meteorological Observations on 

 Land was again brought under the consideration of the Royal Society in a 

 letter from the Board of Trade in May 1865, and the President and 



