Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, Fifth Series, No. 44, Vol. I, November 1, 1884

No. 44.—Vol. I.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 1884.
In the minds of foreigners, it is held to be one of the many peculiarities of the people of these islands that so much of their casual conversation consists of remarks on the weather. The national temperament is often held to be responsible for this failing; but some of the blame must no doubt be laid at the door of the weather itself. Our climate presents such a record of change and uncertainty, that we need not wonder if it is always in our minds, and the first subject on our lips when we meet a friend. Other lands may have their cold and hot, dry, and rainy periods, that come round in the proper order year after year with unvarying monotony; but with us it may be said of the weather, that we rarely know what a day or an hour may bring forth. Even the seasons seem occasionally to be independent of any necessity of visiting us at the particular time of the year at which we have been taught to expect them. Spring weather in November, or a winter temperature in July, or a November fog in the merry month of May, all seem to be amongst the possibilities of our climate.
Happily, our meteorologists are at length beginning to define with growing clearness and confidence the laws which underlie and regulate the complicated and ever varying phenomena which we call the weather, and many of these laws, like most natural laws, are beautiful in their simplicity. Although ‘weather wisdom’ is as old as history itself, the science of the weather or meteorology is a growth of the last few years. The weather wisdom of our forefathers may in the light of present knowledge be divided into sense and nonsense. Under the nonsense may be included not only such proverbs as that which attributed to St Swithin’s day and certain other times and seasons, occult influences over the weather, but most of the information of the old almanacs, which used to ascribe the character of the weather to the positions and movements of the heavenly bodies and the age and changes of the moon. The prevalence of the belief that the weather was regulated by such influences, can only be accounted for by the well-known love of the human mind for the wonderful and inexplicable. Much of the old weather lore, however, had a large element of truth in it, and was the result of the collective experience of many generations, which had found that certain phenomena were generally followed by certain conditions of weather. The saying, that a rosy sky in the morning presages rainy weather, and the same appearance in the evening, fine weather, was current weather lore before the Christian era, and is recognised as being, in a certain sense, true at the present day. Amongst sailors, farmers, shepherds, and such like, weather maxims, the result of observation and experience, have always been current, and the value of many of these is now recognised and explained by science.