Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/438

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HIS thousand-year-old observation by England's wisest ruler recognizes the fact that fine weather induces good tempers, and therefore amply justifies the proverb that shrewdly bids one "Do business with men when the wind is in the northwest."

But this effect on the minds of men does not exhaust the good and the evil of weather conditions, since our comfort, our convenience and even the success or failure of whatever we undertake, all depend, in large measure, upon clear skies and cloudy, upon wind and rain, and upon everything that renders the elements fair or foul.

Because, then, of the great influence weather conditions have over human affairs numerous rules for foretelling their coming changes have been formulated in all ages and by all peoples. While many of these rules are of general application, many others, as might be suspected, have only a local value, and owe their justification to some peculiar configuration of mountain and valley, or distribution of land and water, and, therefore, when transferred to other places commonly are meaningless, if not even misleading. Nevertheless, all of them, the wise and the silly, the good and the bad, have been inherited alike from the ends of the earth; and in this way many a concise saying has become a weather nugget in that great vein of wisdom and folly called folk lore.

Some of these nuggets are as pure gold, for they correctly state the actual order of sequence, as determined by innumerable observations, even when the cause for such an order was not in the least understood by those who discovered it; but most of them are as only fools' gold, pretty in form, but wholly deceptive. To this latter class belong hundreds of proverbs of the ground-hog and goose-bone type: some owing their origin to one thing and some to another, but, like predictions based upon the weather of saints' days, or upon the phase of the moon and the pointing of its horns, never for a moment accepted by those whose reason demands an adequate cause for every effect.

But that other class of weather proverbs, those that do have more or less to support them, is worthy of very careful consideration and study, for they embody accurate descriptions of phenomena and express the usual sequence of events.