Vol. 6, 1920 
GEOPHYSICS: C. F. MARVIN 
569 
12. VOLCANOLOGICAI. INVESTIGATIONS 
This work is now confined to studies of the activity of the Kilauea Volcano located 
on the Island of Hawaii. It has been conducted by the Weather Bureau for little more 
than a year, is scientific in character, and it is impracticable at this time to assign thereto 
any pecuniary return to the people. 
APPROPRIATION 
The appropriation for the Weather Bureau for the fiscal year ending 
June 30, 1920, amounted to $1,880,200, almost the whole of v^hich is 
expended for public service, and under existing conditions but little is 
available for investigation and research. It is very easy to show that 
.benefits accrue to the United States in the proportion of much more than 
one thousand to one. 
PROBLEMS OF METEOROLOGY 
It is now necessary to carry on all the practical routine functions of 
this service while the forecasters and officials are still doubtful concerning 
many of the most fundamental and important laws and causes of the at- 
mospheric phenomena with which the science deals. 
Education. — Very few of the great universities carry any courses in 
advanced meteorology. In fact, meteorology receives far less attention 
in the institutions of learning than is given to almost any other branch 
of science. Tendencies to the more profound recognition of meteorology 
in education are in evidence, and it is earnestly hoped that much more 
intensive attention can be given to this science in view of its enormous 
practical importance in the everyday life of humanity. 
Meteorological Laboratories. — Progress in other lines of science has been 
made in many cases by leaps and bounds through the establishment of 
laboratories for the conduct of specific investigations. The really great 
problems of meteorology cannot be brought within the domain of a labo- 
ratory, and no real meteorological laboratory yet exists, although certain 
elemental phenomena of meteorology admit of investigation in the best 
physical laboratories. Progress is delayed, no doubt, because of the in- 
ability to subject the great major phenomena of meteorology to labora- 
tory and controlled investigation. The difficulties involved in these 
considerations appear to be inherent and insurmountable, leaving to 
the student only the alternative of minutely analyzing the complex mass 
of meteorological data, with the view to working out the more or less 
indefinite correlations and the coefficients of involved equations represent- 
ing all the factors in operation in arriving at any particular result. The 
masses of data available are enormous, and meteorology has been criticized 
for continuing to accumulate, as it must from other important considera- 
tions, observations of every sort of atmospheric condition while its dis- 
cussion is sadly neglected. Students are needed to study this mass of 
data, and it is often difficult to know where to begin or how to proceed. 
