44 
grapher, all those observations which can properly be made 
use of in framing charts for purposes of navigation, but not 
those which relate to meteorology proper and the Presi- 
dent, in referring to this, interprets the term “ meteorology 
proper” to mean merely “the land meteorology of the 
British Islands but how this singular interpretation was 
arrived at is not stated. He then goes on to urge the desir- 
ability of establishing “ a few stations — say six — distributed 
at nearly equal distances, in a meridional direction, from 
the South of England to the North of Scotland, furnished 
with self-recording instruments, supplied from, and duly 
verified at, one of the stations, regarded as a central station.” 
This central station, he afterwards suggests, should be the 
Observatory of the British Association, at Kew. Now, it 
has long been known to meteorologists that deductions 
from observations made within the narrow limits of the 
British Islands are quite insufficient to lead to the detection 
and development of the laws which regulate those great 
movements and phenomena of the atmosphere upon which 
the daily changes in the weather at any given station de- 
pend. The principal meteorological elements of the British 
Islands have already been determined with considerable 
accuracy, from observations made during long series of 
years, at various observatories and stations, both public and 
private ; and any minute changes in their values that may 
be rendered necessary by future observations with improved 
instruments, are not at all likely to have any sensible in- 
fluence on the empirical laws upon which storm warnings 
have been based. The truth is, this land meteorology 
scheme is altogether unnecessary for the purpose of cor- 
recting these empirical laws. It is not so much in the 
multiplication of observations over limited areas, as in the 
adoption of improved methods of combining and treating 
observations at stations scattered some distance apart over 
every accessible portion of the earth’s surface, that we must 
