74 
Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. 
which was in the county of Meath, and therefore more advan- 
tageously situated (for the Office) tlian the west of Connaught. 
The reader should be reminded that the Office expressly stated 
in 1879 that it did not feel confidence in its ability, with the 
means at present at its command, to issue forecasts of utility for 
the exposed Atlantic coasts of these islands. 
All that can be said, therefore, is that the office is able to 
issue in the afternoon forecasts for the following d.ay which are 
reasonably right in three cases out of four. The results of the 
forecasts issued to our continental neighbours in Germany by 
the office in Hamburg are somewhat higher, reaching a pro- 
portion of correctness of four out of five. 
It must, however, be remembered that they enjoy the advan- 
tage of being covered on the westward by the British Isles, so 
that they get longer warning of changes coming on from the 
Atlantic than it is possible for us, in our exposed condition, 
to have. 
As regards the latter of the two resolutions on p. 69 the desire 
that an authoritative manual of weather knowledge for popular use 
should be prepared is a very old one. In this country it was 
expressed by the Committee who reported to the Board of Trade 
on Admiral FitzRoy's work in 1866. Fourteen years after that 
date we find that no such book is in existence in this country, 
and it has hardly been thought of elsewhere ! The fact is that 
the intrinsic difficulty of preparing a manual which shall assign 
due weight on the one hand to the ascertained relations of wind 
and weather to the distribution of pressure and temperature as 
shown by weather charts, and on the other to non-instrumental 
observations, such as the appearance of clouds, of the sky at 
sunset and sunrise, &c., is such as has hitherto deterred anyone 
from attempting the task. The manual recently published by 
the Meteorological Office, ' Aids to the Study and Forecast of 
Weather,' by the Rev. W. Clement Ley, is exceedingly useful 
for those who have some knowledge of the science of meteoro- 
logy, but is hardly suited for the use of a beginner. My own 
little book, ' Weather Charts and Storm Warnings ' (Kegan 
Paul and Co.), treats of the subject only with reference to the 
weather charts which appear in newspapers. 
What is then the lesson to be learnt from the whole Con- 
ference? We have seen that there is hardly a single resolution 
which affords a definite answer to any of the questions of the 
programme, and the demand on all sides is for continued 
observations and investigations. 
In this country any undertaking of regular observations must 
apparently be left to private enterprise, as there is no depart- 
ment of the Government within whose province it would fall ; 
