Page:A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury.pdf/292

278 crops, many millions of dollars less than they would have received had they known, before selling, the actual cash value of the crops as accurately as it was known after they were sold. . ..

"The crops may be regarded, in one sense, as a meteorological expression of the weather, from seed time to harvest; for that there is a physical relation between the weather and the crops is obvious to all. . ..

"I wrote and lectured on this subject before the war, and I promised then, that if you would give me a lock of cotton from every bale, I would undertake, with that as a fund, to defray all the necessary expenses for forecasting the weather and crops for you, and to render to agriculture and the land services far more signal and valuable than those which commerce and navigation were then reaping from the Wind and Current Charts, and my researches touching the physics of the sea. Nay, I went further, and promised to give back your ounce of cotton, if you would lend me influence with your representatives in Congress in favour of an Act just to permit me to do for the land what I was already doing for the sea. I simply sought leave to extend my observations over the country so as to comprehend its industries, and bring continents as well as oceans within my field of research.

"I would, I have always thought, have carried the day then, and won this great boon for science and for you, but for official obstruction, which arrested its progress until the war broke upon us. . ..

"The machinery for putting this plan into operation is, so far as this country is concerned, all ready—all it wants is the gearing up. You have your Signal Office where weather reports are continually received by telegraph, and whence telegraphic forecasts are issued daily.

"And though this work is so new to the officers engaged