196 
SECOND REPORT— 1832. 
Report upon the Recent Progress and Present State of Meteo¬ 
rology. By James D. Forbes, Esq. F. R. S.L.&E. F. G. S. 
Member of the Royal Geographical Society , of the Society 
of Arts for Scotland, and Honorary Member of the York¬ 
shire Philosophical Society. 
I feel that, in undertaking a Report upon the recent progress 
and present state of Meteorology, I have engaged in a task 
of greater difficulty than most persons are probably aware of; 
greater, too, than attaches to sciences of which the fabric is more 
deeply founded and massive, but at the same time more con¬ 
nected. 
In the science of Astronomy, for example, as in that of Op¬ 
tics, the great general truths which emerge in the progress of 
discovery, though depending for their establishment upon a 
multitude of independent facts and observations, possess suffi¬ 
cient unity to connect in the mind the bearing of the whole ; 
and the more perfectly understood connexion of parts invites 
to further generalization. 
Very different is the position of an infant science like Meteo¬ 
rology. The unity of the whole, or of the individual greater 
divisions of which it is composed, is not always kept in view, 
even as far as our present very limited general conceptions will 
admit of; and as few persons have devoted their whole atten¬ 
tion to this science alone, or the whole exertions which they 
did bestow, to one branch of so wide a held,—no wonder that 
we find strewed over its irregular and far-spread surface, 
patches of cultivation upon spots chosen without discrimina¬ 
tion and treated on no common principle, which defy the im¬ 
prover to inclose, and the surveyor to estimate and connect 
them. Meteorological instruments have been for the most 
part treated like toys, and much time and labour have been lost 
in making and recording observations utterly useless for any 
scientific purpose. Even of the numerous registers of a rather 
superior class, which monthly, quarterly, and annually are 
thrown upon the world, how few can be expected to afford, or 
are even intended to afford, specific information upon any one 
leading doctrine or fact of the science ! These hardly contain 
one jot of information ready for incorporation in a Report on 
the progress of Meteorology: such of them as are fitted for 
undergoing an analysis must previously have furnished the raw 
material, as it were, for the construction of some arbitrary 
general laws tp connect phenomena, when duly combined with 
