sirocco, but give warning of its coming, their science will justify its claim to consideration.  The common sense of mankind always demands as a royalty from every science daily practical benefits to the mass of men and women.  It is not enough for meteorologists to have proved that the atmosphere varies in weight, in temperature or velocity of motion according to fixed rules, or to be able to explain why no rain falls on a certain portion of the coast of Portugal, while a like coast-exposure in England is incessantly drenched; or to have determined beyond a doubt that precisely as the ocean of water, under the influence of the moon and wind, ebbs and flows and has its succession of storms or calms, the ocean of air in which we are enveloped answers to the influence of the sun in great tidal movements, and has also its vast steadily moving waves of cold or heat or moisture.  These discoveries of general truths must be brought to bear directly on men’s daily life before they will have fulfilled their true purpose.  It would seem as if nothing were more easy than to bring them so to bear.  Meteorology, more intimately perhaps than any other science, concerns our ordinary affairs.  The health of mankind, navigation, agriculture, commerce, the hourly business and needs of every man, from the merchant sending out his cargo and the consumptive waiting for death in the east wind, to the laundress hanging out the family wash, are ruled by that most mysterious, most uncurbed of powers, the weather.  We may rub along through life with scanty knowledge of the history of dead nations or the philosophy of living ones, but heat and cold, the climate of the coming winter, yesterday’s rainfall or to-morrow’s frost, are matters which take hold of every one of us and affect us every hour of the day.  Now, to bring the known general truths of this science to practical rules, or to base upon them predictions of storms or changes in the weather during any future period, requires, as Sir John Herschel stated twelve years ago, “patient, incessant and laborious observations, carried on in every region of the globe.”  One reason why this is required is the perpetually shifting conditions of heat, wind and storm.  A man who sat down to work a mathematical problem in the days of Job, if there was such a man, found its result just the same as the school-boy does to-day:  figures not only never lie, but never alter.  But the man who solves an equation of which the winds and waters are members finds that the sum to be added varies with every hour.  There are, so far as is yet known, no regularly recurring cycles of weather on which to base predictions:  the conditions of heat and wind and moisture are never precisely the same at any given point.  Hence the necessity, if we would give the science stability and bring it to bear on our daily life, of educated, skilled observers at different points to collect and report simultaneously the daily details of the present conditions.