848 
THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS. 
[April 26,1873. 
At the last meeting of the British Association at 
Brighton, a paper by Mr. Meldrum, of the Mauritius, was 
read, in which he showed that the cyclones for which that 
district of the Indian Ocean enjoys an unenviable noto¬ 
riety have been more frequent in some years than in 
ethers, and that these years of maximum frequency oc¬ 
curred at intervals of about 11 years, coinciding with 
those of maximum sunspot frequency. This agreement is 
most important, and it has been abundantly corroborated 
by an examination of the rainfall at such stations in the 
southern hemisphere as are available. This has been car¬ 
ried out by Mr. Lockyer, in ‘ Nature,’ as well as by Mr. 
Meldrum. The results, for the comparatively short period 
to which they refer, are most striking, as they are suffi¬ 
cient to show that a periodicity is traceable in the weather 
of the Indian Ocean which is eminently suggestive of a 
close relationship between the changes which take place 
in the sun’s surface, and the phenomena of our own atmo¬ 
sphere. 
But, why has not this periodicity, if it exists, been de¬ 
tected long ago by an examination of European records, 
which are far more complete than any existing for the 
Indian Ocean ? The answer to this is twofold : in the 
first place, we are preeminently in the district of the va¬ 
riable winds, and our storms are not nearly so regular in 
their character as those of the Mauritius, where almost 
the sole type of storm is the true tropical cyclone, with 
its concomitant rainfall. It is next to impossible in this 
country to keep an accurate record of all the several 
storms which pass over us. The existence of conjugate 
-storms is not unfrequent; two and even three systems of 
disturbance being traceable at the same time within the 
area of the United Kingdom. Are these one single storm 
or several ? and how should they be counted in a cata¬ 
logue ? Rain also cannot be taken as a sign of the fre¬ 
quency of storms in a year; for although we know that 
warm winters are invariably wet and stormy, it cannot be 
asserted that the all but constant rainfall of the early part 
of last year was in any way related to storms. 
There is, however, in the second place, a far deeper 
reason for the non-discovery of these cycles in any chance 
series of rainfall records. The sun passes through phases 
of greater and less activity, and the terrestrial phenomena 
corresponding to the epochs of the former character are 
excessive evaporation in some parts of the globe, and con¬ 
sequent excessive precipitation in others. It must there¬ 
fore be ascertained in what districts we are to look for the 
one and for the other of these phenomena respectively. 
The fact of the mutual compensation of anomalies will 
show that it is not imposssble that the years of maximum 
rainfall at the Mauritius may be years of great dryness 
here. In fact, it cannot yet be said where the maximum 
solar effect is produced. Mr. Lockyer has pointed out 
that we must aim at attaining a thorough knowledge of 
the movements and changes of our own atmosphere, and 
then seek to establish a connection between them and 
•other cosmical phenomena, such as terrestrial magnetism, 
the relation of which to the state of the sun’s surface was 
pointed out by Sir E. Sabine twenty years ago. 
With "Weather Telegraphy and Storm Warnings the 
name of Admiral Eitzroy will always be associated. This 
country, however, was not the first to issue telegraphic 
weather intelligence to its seaports ; for in the year 1860, 
when the possibility of introducing such a system was 
being discussed here in London, the step had actually been 
taken in Holland, at the instance of Prof. Buys Ballot. 
At the present time there is not a single European coun¬ 
try, except Greece, which has not its own meteorological 
organization. In most cases telegraphic weather reports 
are published in the newspapers, while the example set by 
Le Verrier, about 1858, of the publication of a litho¬ 
graphed- daily bulletin, has been followed by our own 
office, more than 600 copies of whose charts are issued 
■daily to subscribers and for exhibition at seaports. Of 
late years Russia, too, has commenced the publication of 
a lithographed bulletin. 
To see weather telegraphy on its grandest scale, we 
must cross the Atlantic, where, under the direction of 
Brigadier-General Myer, no less than three charts are 
issued every day by the Chief Signal Office of the United 
States at Washington. This undertaking is rendered 
possible by the fact that the whole organization is military, 
and that its efforts are almost entirely concentrated on the 
preparation of these reports, while the telegraphic system 
of the States is placed at the disposal of the Signal Office 
for a certain space of time every day. By this means it 
is possible to publish the chart and report simultaneously 
in all the principal cities of the States. At the outside, 
£4000 a year is spent in this country on weather telegraphy, 
while the vote for the Signal Office, or, to use its familiar 
designation in the New York Herald, for “ Old Probabili¬ 
ties,” in the United States, is no less than 250,000 dollars, 
about fourteen times as much. 
In our system of stations the first thing noticeable is, that 
we are entirely exposed to the westward, the direction 
from whence most of our storms come, and that we have 
little prospect of improving our condition in this respect. 
Proposals have been made to moor vessels off our coasts, 
having telegraphic communication with the shore, and to 
use them as floating observatories. A trial made with 
H.M.S. “ Brisk,” at the entrance of the Channel, resulted 
in a total failure. The proposal has just been resuscitated 
in the United States by Mr. Morse, who proposes to moor 
buoys out at sea with observing turrets on them. The 
Portuguese Government intend to establish a reporting- 
system between the Azores and the mainland, and an 
application has been made to the Meteorological Com¬ 
mittee to contribute towards the expense, who at once 
replied that they would be ready to assist in this particular 
development of weather telegraphy to the extent of then- 
powers. 
Comparison between the 8 A.M. reports from Angra do 
Heroismo in the Azores and from Valencia has been made 
for the last 2f years, and there is not a single instance in 
which the progress of a storm from the Azores to these 
islands can be traced ; the two barometrical curves pursue 
their respective courses almost entirely independently of 
each other, and so far from it being true, as has been as¬ 
serted, “ that no country would benefit by this intelligence 
(from theAzores)so much as Great Britain,’’the primdfacie 
evidence afforded by the diagrams is, that the balance of 
advantage to be gained by the proposed connection would 
fall to the Azores. It, however, is undeniable that it 
would be a great advantage to us to know daily what 
were the atmospheric conditions over the district of the 
Atlantic where the islands in question are situated. 
Our experience of the value of Transatlantic reports has 
not been satisfactory. For three years reports have been 
received daily (free) from Heart’s Content, through the 
liberality of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, but they 
have not been of much practical value ; partly because the 
station was badly placed for wind observations, being in 
a land-locked bay, and partly because uncorroborated 
reports from distant stations cannot be trusted. Accordingly, 
when the committee were asked to pay for the transmis¬ 
sion of the reports, they at once decided to discontinue 
them. 
We now come to the practical portion of our subject, 
the actual forecasting of the weather. The only great 
principle which has been established of late years has 
been the entire dependence of the wind, as to both its 
direction and its force, on the barometrical gradient, and 
not on the absolute height of the barometrical column. 
This principle is known as Buys Ballot’s law. The law 
is—“ Stand with your back to the wind, and the barometer 
will be lower on your left hand than on your right.” As 
a simple result of this fertile generalization, we find that 
there is no danger of a gale, unless the gradient, or differ¬ 
ence between barometrical readings over a given distance, 
exceeds 0*6 in. per 50 miles in the district where the gale 
will be felt. The attempts which have been made to 
establish a numerical relation between the gradients and 
