Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/498

484 Hitherto, weather-science has depended solely on the study of these terrestrial effects as they vary under varying conditions. Modern meteorological research is confined to the record and study of the actual condition of the weather from day to day at selected stations in different countries. It cannot be denied that the inquiry has not been attended with success. At vast expense, millions of records of heat, rainfall, winds, clouds, barometric pressure, and so on, have been secured; but hitherto no law has been recognized in the variations thus recorded—no law, at least, from which any constant system of prediction for long periods in advance can be deduced.

On this point I shall quote, first, a remarkable saying of Sir W. Herschel's, which appears to me, like many such sayings of his, to be only too applicable to the present state of science. In endeavoring to interpret the laws of weather, "we are in the position," Herschel remarks, "of a man who hears at intervals a few fragments of a long history related in a prosy, unmethodical manner. A host of circumstances omitted or forgotten, and the want of connection between the parts, prevent the hearer from obtaining possession of the entire history. Were he allowed to interrupt the narrator, and ask him to explain the apparent contradictions, or to clear up doubts at obscure points, he might hope to arrive at a general view. The questions that we would address to Nature are the very experiments of which we are deprived in the science of meteorology."

The late Prof. De Morgan, indeed, selected meteorology as the subject on which, above all others, systematic observations had been most completely wasted—as a special instance of the failure of the true Baconian method (which, be it noticed, is not, as is so commonly supposed, the modern scientific method). "There is an attempt at induction going on," says De Morgan, "which has yielded little or no fruit, the observations made in the meteorological observatories. This attempt is carried on in a manner which would have caused Bacon to dance for joy" (query); "for he lived in times when chancellors did dance. Russia, says M. Biot, is covered by an army of meteorographs, with generals, high officers, subalterns, and privates, with fixed and defined duties of observation. Other countries, also, have their systematic observations. And what has come of it? Nothing, says M. Biot, and nothing will ever come of it: the veteran mathematician and experimental philosopher declares, as does Mr. Ellis" (Bacon's biographer), "that no single branch of science has ever been fruitfully explored in this way." A special interest attaches, I may remark, to the opinion of M. Biot, because it was given upon the proposal of the French Government to construct meteorological observatories in Algeria.

It is well known that our Astronomer Royal holds a similar