both
recording their own story, within these humble-looking wooden sheds, as
completely as the wind and the rain are made to do the same thing, on
the top of the towers of the Observatory. The reward given to the
inventor of this ingenious mode of self-registration has been recently
revealed in a parliamentary paper, thus: "To Mr. Charles Brooke for his
invention and establishment at the Royal Observatory, of the apparatus
for the self-registration of magnetical and meteorological phenomena,
L500." Every year the invention will save fully L500 worth of human
toil; and the reward seems small when we see every year millions voted
for warlike, sinecure, and other worse than useless purposes.

Photography, however, can not do all the work. Its records have to be
cheeked by independent observations every day, and then both have to be
brought to their practical value by comparison with certain tables which
test their accuracy, and make them available for disclosing certain
scientific results. The preparation of such tables is one of the
practical triumphs of Greenwich. Many a quiet country gentleman amuses
his leisure by noting day by day the variations of his thermometer and
barometer. Heretofore such observations were isolated and of no general
value, but now, by the tables completed by Mr. Glaisher, and published
by the Royal Society, they may all be converted into scientific values,
and be made available for the increase of our weather-wisdom. For nearly
seventy years the Royal Society had observations made at Somerset House,
but they were a dead letter--mere long columns of figures--till these
tables gave them significance. And the same tables now knit into one
scientific whole, the observations taken by forty scientific volunteers,
who, from day to day, record for the Registrar-General of births and
deaths, the temperature, moisture, &c., of their different localities,
which vary from Glasgow to Guernsey, and from Cornwall to Norwich.

What the Rosetta stone is to the history of the Pharaohs, these
Greenwich tables have been to the weather-hieroglyphics. They have
afforded something like a key to the language in which the secrets are
written; and it remains for industrious observation and scientific zeal
to complete the modern victory over ancient ignorance. Already the
results of the Greenwich studies of the weather have given us a number
of curious morsels of knowledge. The wholesale destruction of human life
induce