PROCEEDINGS OF THE PERTHSHIRE SOCIETY OF NATURAL SCIENCE. 
53 
Bazaar), as a memento of what he had done for the 
Society 
59 Ennismore. Gardens, Priuce’s Gate, S.W., 
London, December 28th, 1881. 
Dear Dr White,—I t gave me great pleasure to receive your 
letter of the 20th inst., with so satisfactory an account of the 
results of the Bazaar, the success of which has been so much 
owing to the great trouble you and the Committee have taken 
with it throughout. It would indeed have been a happy day for 
Sir Thomas had he lived to see his much-desired object realised 
to what would have been the very utmost of his wishes. I can 
assure you it is a great pleasure to me to feel that this has been 
the case. I canDOt express how deeply I appreciate the kindness 
of the Bazaar Committee in thinking of me, by sending the 
beautiful medallion that I have received from them; anil I must 
ask you to convey to the Committee my warmest and most 
grateful thanks for their kindness. I shall indeed value the gift, 
not only for the intrinsic value of the medallion, but by the 
knowledge thal in sending it to me it proves how truly the Com¬ 
mittee still cling to the remembrance of their much-beloved late 
President, and value the great interest he ever took in the work, 
which I trust may now prosper, as it has begun, to the utmost 
wishes of all who have done so much for it. With repeated 
thanks for your kind letter, believe me, dear Dr White, yours 
very sincerely, Louisa Monoreiffe. 
On the motion of the chairman the letter was ordered to 
be engrossed in the minutes. 
The following papers were read ; — 
1. “ Local Meteorological Conditions , and Conditions of 
Local Meteorology .” By Mr James Moncur. 
From the earliest times the relation of the signs which 
appeared on the face of Nature, as she spread out 
her panorama of earth, sea, and sky, have been closely ob¬ 
served and recorded by people in every country whose 
language has been a written one. And in the most de¬ 
graded of human races the utterance of the elements, as 
the thunder has rolled in the canopy of cloud overhead, 
the lightnings shot their thunder-bolts of fire, and the 
winds howled like demons in the tempest, have aroused in 
the savage mind the feelings of fear, dismay, and awe. 
Whilst these occasion dread and fear to the savage soul 
(taming it with music peculiarly their own), they have 
lent inspiration to the grandest of poets, and have given 
loftiness and majesty to their epics or dirges, as they wrote 
the one or chanted the other. Some of our noblest fictions 
are continuous psalms, phrased to the rhythm of ocean’s 
cadences, or the brook’s ripplings, and the sighiugs of 
the zephyrs, as they have sung in softest lullaby the 
heroes and heroines of their stories to a tranquil sleep- 
sometimes that of death. Who that has read Ossian, or 
Victor Hugo’s “ Toilers of the Sea,” but can realise how 
fully such descriptions are verified; whilst in the front 
rank of such imagery are the Sacred Canon and Shake¬ 
speare’s gifted plays. So much, however, by way of intro¬ 
duction, to what I find, must needs, at the beginning, be 
somewhat of a literary, as much as a scientific, paper. 
My paper is made up of two parts, which I will deal with 
in their order, not in an exhaustive manner by any means, 
but only so far as the limited time allowed me from other 
avocations and duties have on the present occasion per¬ 
mitted. In my observations I mean ,to confine myself 
more immediately—1st, to the city and its surroundings, 
within a two-miles’ radius from its centre; and, next, to 
the country beyond this line and immediately adjacent; 
and, thirdly, to places more distant, but having some cor¬ 
responding resemblances in their situations on the records 
of their meteorological observations. The position of Perth 
—only 25 feet above the sea-level, and about as many miies 
from the ocean, traversed by the beautiful river which 
flows alongside of us, intersected by canals, and surrohnded 
on all sides (except the gorge through which the river flows 
east and north and north-west) by ranges of hills—renders 
its atmosphere damp and chilly. Shut out from the 
genial influences of south-west winds, and fully open 
to all the rudeness and severity of Boreas’ blasts, its 
air is normally cold and raw. Again, the prevailing gusts 
of east wind which sift themselves through our clothes in 
the spring months, and penetrate every hole and chink in 
our houses, drying up the pores of our skin, producing all 
the aches and biliary complaints congenial to such circum¬ 
stances, are the happy experiences of the men and maidens 
of the Fair City, for at least one-third of the year. 
The barometer at Perth, whilst I was observer, was 36 feet 
above the average meantide-level. It was, as all instru¬ 
ments recommended by the Meteorological Society are, 
an upright mercury tube, and was compensated to suit the 
expansion and contraction of the metal; and, taken along 
with thermometer and hygrometer, I found the place 
where the observations were made, at the General Prison, 
quite a good enough one for observing, and sufficiently 
sensitive to give early notice of previous changes of the 
weather with very considerable accuracy. 
In the neighbourhood of a growing city it is somewhat diffi¬ 
cult to find out free conditions for taking satisfactorily the 
true meterological state of the place where the town stands, 
without such observations being influenced by the houses 
and works of the population. No such drawbacks are, as 
a rule, to be found in our modern cemeteries, as men are 
generally foolish enough to choose some open healthy spot 
to rest in when they die—however they may be housed 
