1880.] 



President's Address. 



83 



British Isles have now been supplied with instruments of the pattern 

 proposed by him. We may thus hope to obtain in future a sufficient 

 record of a meteorological element, which is of primary importance 

 in its relations to agriculture, and to the public health, but which has 

 hitherto been very imperfectly registered. 



2. The climatology of the Arctic regions, in addition to its 

 importance as a part of the general physics of the globe, possesses a 

 special interest in connexion with geographical exploration. As a 

 contribution to our knowledge of this subject, the Meteorological 

 Office has entrusted to Mr. R. Strachan the task of bringing together, 

 and discussing on an uniform plan, the results of the observations 

 taken at intervals during the last sixty years, in the region extending 

 from the meridian of 45° W. to that of 120° W., and from the 

 parallel of 60° to that of 80°, either a't land stations or at the winter 

 quarters of British and American expeditions. A considerable poi- 

 tion of this discussion has been already published ; the remainder 

 may be expected in the course of next year. 



3. Another publication of the Meteorological Office may be men- 

 tioned as serving to mark the advance in meteorological theory, which 

 has been achieved during the last fifteen years. The old " Barometer 

 Manual and Weather Guide " of the Board of Trade has been 

 replaced, so far as it relates to the weather of the British Isles, by a 

 work entitled "Aids to the Study and Forecast of Weather," pre- 

 pared under the direction of the Meteorological Office by the Rev. W. 

 Clement Ley. Though some of the views put forward in the later 

 work may, perhaps, be regarded as not sufficiently established by 

 observation, yet a comparison of the two works cannot fail to leave 

 upon the reader's mind the impression that in the interval between 

 their respective dates of publication, some real progress has been 

 made in meteorology. Perhaps this is most conspicuous in the 

 enlarged ideas that are now entertained concerning the conditions 

 upon which the changes of weather depend. Local weather was first 

 discovered to be contingent upon travelling areas of disturbance, each 

 of which averaged many hundreds of miles in diameter, while, at the 

 present time, the relation of these areas to one another, as parts of a 

 single terrestrial system, has become a prominent topic of inquiry. 

 If meteorology has thus been, to a certain extent, rescued from the 

 ever accumulating chaos of numerical tabulations, which threatened 

 to engulf the whole science, the improvement is mainly due to the 

 development in recent times of the synoptic study of weather over 

 large regions of the earth's surface, to which so great an impetus has 

 been given by the extended facilities of telegraphic communication. 



4. Balloon ascents, with a view to military purposes, are now 

 systematically carried on under the direction of the War Office ; and 

 the endeavour has been made to take advantage of these ascents for 



