WEBBE—TIIE "WEATHER. 
431 
Moat of the prognostications that the tl weatherwise” 
lay down for our edification are nothing more than tradi- 
tional assertions handed down from generation to genera- 
tion without the slightest proof of reality deduced from the 
test of experience, or by fair investigation. “ The sheep 
turn their tails,” says the ignorant shepherd, “ to the 
southwest, therefore , there will be a gale of wind from that 
quarter.” The poor shepherd had heard his seniors make 
this assertion, and therefore implicitly believed it. Poetry, 
too, has lent her aid in handing down various groundless 
prognostications in reference to the weather. “ The rain- 
M bow in the morning is the shepherd’s warning.” “ The 
il evening red and the morning gray,”— and many others 
are uttered with a claim to authority, but in total igno- 
rance of the sequence of cause and effect, or of the modes 
of action which influence the operation of natural phenomena. 
In the meteorological observations before mentioned, 
observations are carefully taken and faithfully recorded, in 
some of them every hour, day and night. But the ob- 
servers do not attempt to make conjectural predictions 
therefrom. They send their accumulated facts to men of 
science, who patiently digest and compare them, in the 
hope of deducing in time some principles by which mete- 
orology may be brought into the form of a philosophical 
system, which it can hardly be said to have as yet assumed. 
Something, it is true, has been already effected. We may 
mention, for instance, that in extra-tropical countries, 
beyond the reach of the Trade winds, the winds in their 
changes have been found to have a preponderating ten-' 
dency to veer in the same direction round the compass 
with the sun’s apparent diurnal course in the heaven’s— 
that is, from east round by south, west, and north, in the 
northern hemisphere, and reversely in the southern. This 
