The complicated
p 338
nature of these disturbing causes (which involuntarily remind us of those
which the near and especially the smallest cosmical bodies, the satellites,
comets, and shooting stars, are subjected to in their course) increases the
difficulty of giving a full explanation of these involved meteorological
phenomena, and likewise limits, or wholly precludes, the possibility of that
predetermination of atmospheric changes which would be so important for
horticulture, agriculture, and navigation, no less than for the comfort and
enjoyment of life. Those who place the value of meteorology in this
problematic species of prediction rather than in the knowledge of the
phenomena themselves, are firmly convinced that this branch of science, on
account of which so many expeditions to distant mountainous regions have
been undertaken, has not made any very considerable progress for centuries
past. The confidence which they refuse to the physicist they yield to
changes of the moon, and to certain days marked in the calendar by the
superstition of a by-gone age.
"Great local deviations from the distribution of the mean temperature are of
rare occurrence, the variations being in general uniformly distributed over
extensive tracts of land.
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