AMERICAN QUARTERLY REVIEW.
ART. I.-Meteorological Essays and Observations, by J. FREDERIC DANIELL, F. R. S. Second edition, revised and enlarged. London. 1827. pp. 648.
THE subject of this work is one of universal interest. No practical application of philosophy comes so close to our comforts and enjoyments, as that which records the phenomena of climate, and investigates the causes of its variations. None, therefore, attracts such general attention; and we philosophize on the changes of the weather, almost without being conscious that our observations and remarks are frequently correct instances of the strictest inductive logic. Man, indeed, is a meteorologist by nature; placed in a state of dependence on the elements, to watch their vicissitudes and anticipate their changes, is a part of the labour to which he is born. The mariner, the shepherd, and the husbandman, are directed in their occupations by meteorological observations, and the necessity of constant attention to the vicissitudes of the weather, is frequently the foundation, among even the most illiterate of our species, of a sort of prescience of the most capricious variations of climate. Thus cultivated in the ruder forms of society, it does not lose its interest in those which are more polished; if the opportunity for experience be then lost, we call in aid scientific methods and rules, derived from the recorded observations of others, to supply the deficiency. Such indeed is the space the subject occupies in our thoughts, that remarks on the state of the weather have become, in many nations, the conventional form of salutation, and in still VOL. III.-No. 5.