The aegis & intelligencer. [volume] (Bel Air, Md.) 1864-1923, 1876-09-01

commerce, wealth grew up, some thousand
years ago, in certain places, and not in
others, as natural results of atmospheric
influences. Ifthe shores of the Eastern
Mediterranean were the first seat of the
worlds progress, it was not because they
furnished easy water-carriagc, but because
they were illuminated by a sunny sky
The glories of Egypt, Greece, and Rome
were, in reality, an affair of weather; they
would have been utterly impossible in
Lapland. Karnak, the Acropolis, the
coliseum could never have been built
amidst snow and ice. The disposition to
work out progress beneath rough skies is
essentially modern tendency; until few
centuries ago civilization was exclusively
q child of warmth.
Ofcourse it may be said that all this is
q matter of climate rather than of weather,
and there is some truth in the objection
but, all the same, weather alone, weather
irrespective of climate, has good deal to
do with history. 1t was, most certainly,
weather which produced the deluge it
was storm which drove inhabitants to
America, and another one which protected
England from the Armada; it was snow
which overwhelmed Napoleon in 1912 it
was fog which helped Mary Stuart to es-
cape the cruisers of Elizabeth and to cross
from France to Scotland; it was fog which
enabled the Russians to get unseen up the
hillside of Inkerman. All this was wealth
er. 1t is weather, not governments, which
keeps the world as it is; the atmosphere
is infinitely moro essential to us than con-
situations if weather changed its actual
forms of action, we should all of us have
to change too. Ifrain happened to dis
appear in Europe, Europeans would dis
appear with it; the green fields of England.
like the vineyards of France and the great
orn-ground of the lower Danube, would
dry up into shriveled wastes while, per-
haps, the dreary plateaux of Thibet would
grow into the garden of the earth. What
would become of the western march of
civilization in such case as that? 1t
really is humiliating to see that politics
and power are, after all, matters Of mere
mud.
The behaviour of rain is question of
almost as much interest to us as its distri-
button. To be Of real use it must come
down in certain way neither too fast
nor too slow; its drops must be neither
too large nor too little; it must fit its
shape to the period of the year and the
needs of the soil; the driving mists of
autumn, the short but heavy downfalls of
July, the sweet, fleet, silvery, April show
ers,"-as Lord Lytton the younger so de-
liciously calls them in that loveliest of
poetic fables, the Thi&tle,-must all arrive
in their time and place. Luckily for us
the personal manners of the rain are not,
like its general conduct, exclusively pro-
duct of its own capricious temper; they
are influenced, to our great advantage, by
something else than winds and sunbeams.
The air itself guides and graduates the
falling drops it diminishes their eager
speed by its resistance; it forbids them to
attain accumulated rapidity it shelters us
by its universal buckler against ferocity
of pelting, which if left unchecked and
uncontrolled, would tlatten us at each
shower. Even the size of the drops is not
quite left to hazard ; amidst so much way
wardness and disorder it follows, excep-
tionally, sort of rule; it depends good
deal it is true, on the quantity of water in
the clouds from which the drops emerge !;
but still, the rain which filters from the
edges of cloud is almost always fine and
small that which tumbles from tue middle
of it is usually big, because its globules
have an opportunity of mixing up with
those below them while, us the dripping
finishes, the drops grow smaller, because,
they find no Others to incorporate with as
they descend.
The services which rain renders are not
limited to the earth and its products; its
action is not solely exercised on plants
Part of its good work is done up above us,
before it gets down to leaves and roots
1t largely influences the air through which
it falls; it cools and purities it; and it
seems even to be admitted as quite prob
able that, in certain cases, it washes away
the germs of endemic and sporadic dis
eases. If ever we could manage to find
out means for directing the weather, it is
not impossible that one OF the results of
the invention would be to enable us to
suppress atmospherically- pregnated in
iections, and that, by skiful use of the
pail and mop on the air we breathe, we
could wipe out of it the faint of q good
many sorts of plague and pestilence. That
pretty dream does not seem likely to be
realized in our time but it is not, perhaps,
so fantastic as it appears at first sight, for
as we have found out how to master light
ming, and how to lead it where we please
how, in fact, to inoculate thunder
it is not altogether ridiculous to hope that
some day, we may do the same for rain.
o