Quack weather predictions are nearly always made for long periods in advance, and their popularity depends upon the fact that they give the public something—however fallacious it may be—that science does not attempt to give. The making of such predictions appears to be a particularly easy way of acquiring both fame and fortune. In this country there has hardly ever been a time when some exponent of this industry did not enjoy a nation-wide reputation. It is a satisfaction to record, however, that foreign countries produce the same sort of celebrities. Dr. Gustav Hellmann, writing in Germany, has recently published an extremely interesting account of the famous “weather prophets” of the 19th and 20th centuries. Their geographical distribution is given as follows: Belgium, 2; Germany, 36; England, 25; France, 14; Italy, 2; Austria-Hungary, 8; Russia, 1; Sweden, 1; Switzerland, 5; Spain, 2; North America, 9. The list for the United States is, to be sure, conspicuously incomplete, but we need not grieve over the fact that the fame of the American prophets omitted from the list has not spread to the Old World.
The almanac is, as it has always been, the chief stronghold of long-range weather predicting. Nobody knows to what extent the almanac prognostications are taken seriously by the public, or are meant to be by the publishers. It is to be feared that the percentage of the population that “swears by them” is not inconsiderable. Almanac publishers would undoubtedly perform a public service, and perhaps save themselves some pangs of conscience, if they would append to their weather predictions the statement that, like the portrait of the gentleman who displays his anatomy to the signs of the zodiac at the front of the book, they are published merely for the sake of keeping up an old custom, and if they would conclude every almanac with the following candid avowal, which we find in Gabriel Frende’s “Almanack and Prognostication” for 1589:
Thou hast my guess at daily weather
Here present in thy view.
My credit shall not lie thereon
That every word is true:
Yet some to please I thought it best
To shew my mynde among the reste.
CHAPTER XV
AGRICULTURAL METEOROLOGY
Two farmers are grumbling about the weather. The scene is Ohio, the time July, and the prevalent crop corn (i. e., maize).
Farmers have grumbled about the weather from time immemorial. The point of interest in this particular case is that the two grumblers do not agree about what is wrong. Farmer A thinks the corn needs rain. Farmer B declares that at this stage rain would do more harm than good. Plenty of warm sunshine is, he thinks, the right prescription to insure a “bumper” crop. Of course Providence will do as it pleases, and whatever weather comes, since it cannot be cured, must be endured; but it is a matter of practical as well as academic interest to get some inkling betimes as to how your crop is going to turn out, and the weather is likely to be the decisive factor. Moreover, it is a very significant fact that our two farmers are not of the same mind about which atmospheric blessing is in default. It is painful to reflect that an enormous amount of grumbling about the weather on the part of the rustic community must, at one time or another, have been misapplied. It is a plausible assumption that farmers have sometimes worried themselves to death over meteorological events that were either harmless or actually beneficial to their crops.
How can we arrive at the facts? Admitting, as everybody does, that the weather has a preeminent influence upon plant life, is this influence susceptible of analysis? Is there anything definite about it? Are not the effects of various atmospheric conditions so entangled with one another, and with the effects of soil and methods of cultivation—to say nothing of insects and plant diseases—as to baffle all attempts to gauge them separately?
There is a new branch of applied science that teaches farmers how to grumble right about the weather. It is called Agricultural Meteorology. As a coherent branch of knowledge, this subject is so new that the first formal textbook about it in the English language was published in the year 1920. It happens that the author of this book, Professor J. Warren Smith, of the United States Weather Bureau, began his investigations in the new field by making a careful study of the relation of weather to the yield of corn in Ohio. Let us see what light his studies shed upon the question at issue between our friends A and B.