Year: 1879

An important article on the weather pre-
dictions we have cabled to Europe was re-
Gently published in the Gentlemans Maga-
another column. It treats fairly and with
justice our efforts in legitimate endeavor
to extend the sphere through which the mass
of information on the weather daily access
sible to us may be made useful.
There are some points in hydrography
very simple to those familiar with the sub
ject, but which owe their apparent SIM
plicity to that familiarity, and which are so
contrary to popular conceptions of the
nature of the world of waters that it is only
by an effort OF the imagination, if at
all, that tho mass of unlearned people can
understand them. For instance, judged
from the ordinary popular standpoint, the
notion CT q river in the ocean is an abb
surdity. People are familiar with rivers
in their ordinary geographical aspect; and
they can understand how the land on
either side Of them confines them to def
mite course, and how the regular fall Of
the country from the mountains sea-





ment in one direction. But rivers through
the sea, with defined edges where there is
no land at all. and with regular
meth odic movement in specific direction,
which movement is not apparently in
any ordinary way related to gravitation,
are not in accord with ordinary notions.
Yet without study of the ocean rivers, or
great permanent currents, we should be
unable to comprehend many great truths
that are at the basis of meteorological
science. 1t it is difficult for people gene
rally to fully accept the notion of this
popularity in the sea it is even more
difficult for them to comprehend that there
is something much like it in the air. Peo-
pie who imagine the sea as vast mass of
equal water at rest, in the absence of the
disturbance Of storms, conceive the atmos-
phere even more resolutely in the same
spirit and refuse to imagine the atmosphere
as o gaseous ocean affected by the rotation
of the earth and moved by electric
and thermal causes into currents perhaps
as permanent and we'll defined as the better
known ones of the sea. Worse still, some
presumptively scientific men are as far
from comprehending the relations of this
fact in the constitution Of the atmosphere
as the mass of uninformed people are from
conceiving and comprehending the ocean
currents. and some scientific" men Of this
sort are even distinguished. meteorologists
They are the men who in Europe have set
about to prove that if we send word by cable
that q storm will probably reach England
by a certain day, and storm does get there
on that day, that this does not prove the
accuracy of our prediction, but is mere
accident or coincidence. even though the
coincidence" happens eighteen times in
twenty. Our predictions of storms to
traverse the Atlantic are simply based upon
the view that there are certain atmospheric
lines of least resistance on which storms
habitually move and on computation of the
speed of the storms that leave our coast on
those lines. Som metimes, though rarely, q
storm falls short and the prediction fails
or sometimes the storm ''carroms" on q
counter current and misses its precise line
of advance and thereby reaches some point
not named in the prediction but we claim
that the predictions actually verified estab-
lish fully the possibility and importance OF
this addition to meteorological science.