42 
cost of the department in which it had its origin. Whether 
the rules on which it is founded are empirical or not, the 
system, as a mere commercial speculation, has been successful, 
and it is therefore difficult to understand why the Board of 
Trade should have attached so much importance to the 
reasons advanced by the President and Council of the Royal 
Society, and allowed them to outweigh other far more 
important considerations. If the President and Council 
think that the superintendence of the duties connected with 
the system of issuing storm warnings would be derogatory 
to the scientific body to whom the discussion of meteoro- 
logical observations will be committed, it does not follow 
that the system ought to be suspended for an indefinite 
length of time, but rather, that its management ought to be 
committed to some more suitably constituted body. If, 
however, it is intended to be understood that the system 
ought to be discontinued because the rules upon which 
storm warnings are founded are, at present, mainly empi- 
rical, then it may be replied that, in the early stages of 
every science, its rules are mainly empirical; but it has 
never before been urged that, therefore, we ought to deprive 
ourselves of such advantages as may be derived from the 
limited amount of knowledge we may happen to possess. 
The rules by which the laws of magnetism are applied to 
the correction of compasses in iron ships are to a great 
extent empirical, and, in spite of the greatest care in their 
application, serious errors are sometimes made ; but are we 
on that account to decline to avail ourselves of such aid as 
they do afford, imperfect, and to some extent uncertain, 
though it may be ? Long after the predicted places of the 
moon were given in the Nautical Almanac , the longitudes 
derived from lunar distances were often very considerably in 
error ; but no scientific man, or body of men, at that time 
ventured to suggest that the publication of the Nautical 
Almanac ought to be suspended until astronomers had 
