1883.] 
Sun-spotter y . 
'S3 
cycles of high prices are marked by depressions for the most 
part well indicated, when, as would appear, the gracious 
goddess of the golden year has harnessed her dragons, and 
emptied her cornucopia on old Albion’s shore. After a lapse 
of sixty-six years the musty Audit Books of Eton College 
furnish us with the prices of middling or mealing wheat per 
quarter, at Windsor Market, from 1646, the year after the 
defeat of Charles I. at the battle of Naseby, down to 1826, 
when George the Fourth was king. During all this long 
time there undulates a marked rise and fall in the wheat 
quotations, the crests of the waves corresponding as they 
rise to the epochs of most sun-spots determined by Prof. 
Wolf. Nor is there here any irregularity to be discerned, 
save that these crests have reached a climax sometimes a 
little before, and sometimes a little after the year specified ; 
or, more rarely, they are a little bifurcated. From 1771, 
previous to the alteration of the Corn Laws, down to 1852, 
when they were repealed by Sir Robert Peel, we possess 
Tables of the average price of British corn per imperial 
quarter in England and Wales, as ascertained by the receiver 
of Corn Returns ; and from 1859 down to the present time 
we possess the Parliamentary Reports or the Agricultural 
Returns for Great Britain. Throughout these long columns 
of quotations the same fluctuation of price in correspondence 
with the sun-spot years is easily checked off, the only pecu- 
liarity presented to the eye being that the monetary cycles 
exhibit a tendency to become somewhat less marked, owing 
to the increasing import of grain that began to take shape 
about the commencement of the eighteenth century. 
The prices of barley and oats fluctuate as the wheat 
quotations, but in cycles less pronounced. Thus 1879 was 
a wet rainy summer over the corn lands in the South of 
England, and it brought with it great distress among the 
agricultural classes : wheat, however, actually fell in price, 
on account of the large importation from America at this 
time. On the other hand, 1878 and 1880 were years when 
the summer rainfall over the West of Scotland fell to a 
minimum, and they came with a rise in the price of British 
oats , according to the Excise Statistics. From this it would 
appear that oats suffer less from a wet season than wheat, 
and I believe the same is true of barley in less degree. As 
regards inseCt ravages, as late as 1876 — which was both a 
locust year and a year of minimum sun-spots — the wheat 
crops of America, according to Government Statistics, gave 
the poorest yield per acre they have done these thirteen years 
past. Here are reasons, then, why the prices of grain should 
