AN EARLY METEOROLOGIST.
Recueil de ma vie, mes ouvrages et mes pensées. Par Thomas Ignace Marie Forster.[[690]] Brussels, 1836, 12mo.
Mr. Forster, an Englishman settled at Bruges, was an observer in many subjects, but especially in meteorology. He communicated to the Astronomical Society, in 1848, the information that, in the registers kept by his grandfather, his father, and himself, beginning in 1767, new moon on Saturday was followed, nineteen times out of twenty, by twenty days of rain and wind. This statement being published in the Athenæum, a cluster of correspondents averred that the belief is common among seamen, in all parts of the world, and among landsmen too. Some one quoted a distich:
"Saturday's moon and Sunday's full
Never were fine and never wull."
Another brought forward:
"If a Saturday's moon
Comes once in seven years it comes too soon."
Mr. Forster did not say he was aware of the proverbial character of the phenomenon. He was a very eccentric man. He treated his dogs as friends, and buried them with ceremony. He quarrelled with the curé of his parish, who remarked that he could not take his dogs to heaven with him. I will go nowhere, said he, where I cannot take my dog. He was a sincere Catholic: but there is a point beyond which even churches have no influence.