Abstract
PROFESSOR RUSKIN'S utterances are perhaps to be taken least seriously when he is himself most serious, and probably he was never more in earnest than in his jeremiad on modern clouds, delivered at the London Institution on the 4th and 11th inst. Probably none of the readers of NATURE have been terrified by the storm cloud of the nineteenth century, but should it be otherwise we hasten at once to their relief. Twenty years before the date fixed by Mr. Ruskin for the first appearance of his portentous “plague-cloud,” the writer of the present article commenced a series of observations on the forms and structures of clouds, followed a few years later by such daily charts of wind and weather as could be constructed from the data, somewhat meagre, that were then accessible. As might be expected, cyclone and anticyclone were then as they are now. The dimensions and densities of the cloud layers have not altered, neither has our moral degeneracy nor the increased smoke of our manufacturing towns developed any new form of cloud. Neither (until the phenomenal sunrises and sunsets of the last three months) has Nature, in painting the clouds, employed upon her palette any fresh tints, whatever artists may have done. Further, we have not observed, nor met with any one, except Mr. Ruskin, who has observed, that the wind during the last thirteen years has adopted a “hissing” instead of a “wailing” tone, or that the pressure anemometer indicates that the motion of the air has become more tremulous than heretofore.
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LEY, W. Mr. Ruskin's Bogies . Nature 29, 353–354 (1884). https://doi.org/10.1038/029353a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/029353a0