Abstract
SIMULTANEOUSLY with the appearance of some important remarks by Mr. Hyde Clarke, in the article “Sun-Spots and the Nile,” NATURE, vol. xix, p. 300, I have been called up by a London clergyman of inquiring mind to answer the charge that a paragraph which he cut out of the Times last year, declaring on my alleged authority that that winter was to be severer in cold than any known for generations had been totally falsified by the event. I would request, therefore, Mr. Editor, a little space in your valuable pages for the following explanations:— I give priority to Mr. Hyde Clarke, on account of his early labours in demonstrating a periodicity in human affairs, somewhat of the type of the sun-spot period subsequently discovered elsewhere. His remarks, too, now, of the probability of the existence of other periods of about 26 and 104 years, and that they “interfere”, or mix up, with what he considers a ten-year period, are also worthy of note. In fact, they are the first public consent I have yet seen to my often insisted on conclusion from the Edinburgh earth thermometers, that the explanation of the eleven-year wave of heat exhibited there, being both immediately preceded and immediately followed by the deepest trough or wave of cold, for each whole eleven-year cycle on either side of it, was precisely caused by the near concurrence just there of two sets of waves of different periods of undulation. But when he goes on to say (line 38, p. 300) that such interference of two or more sets of undulations “prevented any absolute calculation as to the future,” I object to the ruling of that sentence.
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SMYTH, P. Weather, Past and to Come. Nature 19, 338 (1879). https://doi.org/10.1038/019338a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/019338a0
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