Maury had, by this time, become dissatisfied with his situation at Lexington. “I shall not”, he wrote, “risk another winter here for two reasons—one on the score of health. The other—I have worked out Physical Survey as far as it can be worked out without money. And I feel that I am not earning my salt. Though the Board of Visitors and Faculty are kind enough to express quite a different opinion. So after the swallows come I shall begin to inquire about lodgings in Fredericksburg or Richmond. In all, except the salt-earning feature, my situation here is as delightful as man can make it”. Somewhat later, he declared, “They are sounding me about the University of Tennessee. Remember Alabama; I shall look very closely—and not trust to verbal statements—before I commit myself again. You know I intend to cut out from here at the end of the term anyhow. My situation here is charming and delightful as it can be. And though I may be rendering the state service, the state butters me no parsnips. Virginia Military Institute does that and though V. M. I. tries very kindly to persuade me that it’s all the same, I can’t see it. And so I am quite ready for Tennessee or anywhere else that will offer inducements sufficient”.
He, accordingly, handed in his resignation in May to take effect the following September; but there were so many protests against his action, from the Governor of the state all down the line, that he reconsidered the matter and agreed, in July, to remain at V. M. I. for the time being. After his resignation, he had been approached by a member of the Board of Trustees of the Agricultural College near Blacksburg, Virginia, who asked permission to propose Maury’s name as their president, but he declined the proposal. Inquiry was also made of him whether he would accept the presidency of a Polytechnic College to be founded at New Orleans. This appealed to him, particularly on the score of his health, but the project did not materialize.
In addition to his work on the “Physical Survey of Virginia” and his geographical series, Maury spent considerable time upon the preparation and delivery of lectures and addresses, not in great numbers during his first two years at Lexington but with increasing frequency during the last years of his life. Among the notable speeches he made during 1869 were an address to the graduating class of V. M. I., July 2, and another before the Educational Association of Virginia, on December 16. In the former, he emphasized the fact that what they accomplished in life would depend largely on their own ‘resolves’, that they had not ‘finished’ their education but merely laid the foundation, that they should desire to master the specialty they took up but not to become narrow-minded, and that they should form the habit of observing nature for there they would see God. In closing, he called upon them to live up to their traditions. The later address is a plea for the giving of more attention in the educational system to the study of the physical sciences in view of the progress and development of physical discoveries; it began with the statement that the study of science should not make atheists, if the subject was rightly interpreted.
Maury often lectured to the students of Virginia Military Institute, though he gave no regular courses of instruction; for example, in 1872 he gave a series of lectures to the cadets on “What We Owe to Science”. The larger number of his addresses were delivered, however, in the interest of the establishment of a system of universal telegraphic meteorological observations and crop reports,—the plan which he had urged for many years before the Civil War and which that unhappy conflict had cut short. Not long after his return to Virginia, he began to consider this cherished plan again. “You remember before the war”, he wrote, “how hard I tried to get up a Telegraphic Meteorological Bureau—writing and lecturing about it—now as meteorology for the farmers, now as storm-signals combined with crop statistics. When I was in England, during the war, I proposed to Fitzroy, and after his death to his successor, Toynbee, a plan for making, by means of an elastic cloth stretched over his map, a caste of the atmosphere, so that he might take in his whole field of observation at a single glance, and so predict with more certainty. Suppose, for instance, with his map pasted on a table, he had bored a hole through London, Liverpool, Portsmouth, etc., and stuck up in each place a little rod graduated for the barometer; that his elastic cloth was then fitted to a slide so that he could set it at the height of the barometer at each of the stations. Fancy each rod to be surmounted by a wind-vane which could be drawn out or shoved in, to show the force of the wind at each place. Thus you would have a ‘caste of the atmosphere’, and see all about it. Brooke—‘deep-sea lead’—has suggested just such a plan to Myer (General Albert James Myer of the Signal Bureau in Washington); and Myer, I have heard, has adopted it. The idea, I think, was as original with Brooke as it was with me”.
The first address which Maury delivered on the plan for land meteorological observations was at the fair of the Memphis Agricultural and Mechanical Society, on October 17, 1871. In this speech he said that he had dropped the subject at Brussels because the Royal Society of London had advised against it, but that he had ever since regretted this action because he had learned that all Europe had been with him except Bavaria. He then showed how the machinery for putting the scheme into operation in the United States already existed. “You have your Signal Office”, he declared, “where weather reports are continually received by telegraph, and whence telegraphic forecasts are issued daily.... You have also the Agricultural Bureau, in the service of which reports embodying many of the facts and observations required are already made, or might be without any additional expense.... Do you mean to say that amid all the mind, means, and appliances of the age, the relations between the weather and the crops are past finding out? If I could, with just such a system of researches for the sea, sit down in my office and tell the navigator how he would find the wind, at any season of the year, in any part of the ocean through which he wished to sail, am I promising too much when I tell you that by the plan I now propose the relation between the weather and the crops is as capable of scientific development as were the relations between sea-voyages and the winds twenty-five years ago?” At the close of the address, resolutions were offered that the United States government be petitioned through the State Department in favor of the establishment through international coöperation of a plan of universal telegraphic meteorological observations and crop reports, and that another conference similar to that of Brussels in 1853 be called for that purpose.
The different reaction of two of Maury’s friends to this speech is interesting. Rutson Maury wrote, “A large part of your Memphis Address that deals with mercantile matters is sheer nonsense.... You ought to have some Sancho Panza to accompany you when you go a-tilting”. Being a New Yorker, he would naturally not be in sympathy with an effort to deflect even a small part of its trade from that metropolis. Dr. Tremlett’s opinion of the speech was more complimentary. “I have”, he wrote, “read your last ‘spread eagle’ at Memphis. Capital, clever, business-like like everything you do; but unrealizable”.
The address was followed up by the sending of resolutions to various state governors, and some attempts were made to gain the coöperation of officials in Washington. In the latter quarter, however, no headway was made, as indicated in the following communication to Maury from Senator Johnston of Virginia: “I therefore called upon Mr. Watts, the Commissioner of Agriculture, who scarcely had the civility to hear me. He made the conversation very short, and said that he had just ordered the meteorological reports which his predecessor had been collecting and publishing to be discontinued. I ventured mildly to suggest that if meteorology did not appertain to his Department, at least Agriculture did. He gave this a qualified assent, but told me very positively that he would have nothing to do with the proposed scheme. I met with the same rebuff in other quarters and fancied that I saw a premeditated and arranged plan of resistance. Under these circumstances it was manifestly useless to move now, and so I have not offered the amendment (to provide funds for delegates to the International Agricultural Congress) and will not do so at this session. I am sorry indeed that a scheme so useful should be so treated”.
Maury was undaunted by such rebuffs and continued his campaign. On May 29, 1872 he addressed the National Agricultural Congress at St. Louis, declaring that Europe was ripe for such a scheme and citing the names of the following influential supporters of it abroad: Alexander Buchan, Secretary of the Scottish Meteorological Society; Commodore Jansen of Holland; Quetelet, Astronomer Royal and Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sciences of Brussels; Marie Davy, Zurcher, and Margolle, meteorologists and savants of France; and Father Secchi of the Collegio Romano in Italy. The legislatures of Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia, he declared, had passed resolutions instructing Congress to support an international conference; and he suggested that they bring further influence to bear on Congress through state agricultural societies, agricultural journals, and the general press of the country. He called attention to the fact that his interest in the scheme was not a private one, since he had no farm, and could not share in the honor of helping to organize and carry out the plan for the government. He closed with an eloquent plea, emphasizing the benefits to be derived, which he estimated would be as great as those formerly bestowed upon commerce by the results of the Brussels Conference.
On August 13 of the same year he spoke before the Agricultural Convention of Georgia at Griffin. Here he covered about the same ground that he had in his St. Louis speech, and used the same arguments, though the language was different and it was not a mere repetition of the former address. He also, in it, treated the question of immigration, saying that the prejudice which had arisen abroad against the South must be removed; and he once more touched upon the old problem of better trade communications for that section. This latter question had been in Maury’s mind for years, and he at this time advanced bold and original ideas as to the best means of improving conditions.
He declared in one of his letters to Dr. Tremlett that the seat of empire was fast settling down in the Northwest States. “They already give the Presidents”, he wrote, “and will soon dictate the foreign policy of the country. They must have a better way to the sea. They have been taught to believe—erroneously—that the best way lies through Canada and the St. Lawrence. It does not; it lies through Virginia. You will appreciate my feeling on this subject, when I remind you that grain is sent around Cape Horn from California, and delivered at the ports along the Atlantic seaboard at ten cents the bushel cheaper than it can now be sent from Iowa and other Northwest States; that the people throughout these states—and they are the grain-growing states—know that, with a good highway to the Atlantic seaboard, the value of their grain would be enhanced ten, twenty, even thirty cents the bushel; and they think that Canada and the St. Lawrence can give them such a way. The greatest difficulty in teaching these people that their best way to the sea lies through Virginia, not through Canada, is to get our people to raise funds for the gratuitous circulation of the Reports (Preliminary Report on the Resources of Virginia) in sufficient numbers between this and the next meeting of Congress in December. If we can do that, the Northwest States will raise their voices in favor of the Virginia route, and demand the money to open it. When that is done, they will not want Canada, and we shall have peace. Thus you see, my friend, I am aiming high and striking far. But with a few heads such as yours to help, we would hit the mark as sure as a gun”. Not only in his correspondence, but also in the press as well as in his speeches he continued to advocate direct trade between the South and Europe through the establishment of a Norfolk to Flushing line of steamers, which would turn the tide of immigration toward the Southern States.