f infinite mystery. Light and darkness, and
cold and heat, are to him as friends of familiar countenance, but of
infinite variety of conversation; and while the geologist yearns for the
mountain, the botanist for the field, and the mathematician for the
study, the meteorologist, like a spirit of a higher order than any,
rejoices in the kingdoms of the air.

281. But, as we before said, it is neither for its interest, nor for its
beauty, that we recommend the study of meteorology. It involves
questions of the highest practical importance, and the solution of which
will be productive of most substantial benefit to those classes who can
least comprehend the speculations from which these advantages are
derived. Times and seasons and climates, calms and tempests, clouds and
winds, whose alternations appear to the inexperienced mind the confused
consequences of irregular, indefinite, and accidental causes, arrange
themselves before the meteorologist in beautiful succession of
undisturbed order, in direct derivation from definite causes; it is for
him to trace the path of the tempest round the globe, to point out the
place whence it arose, to foretell the time of its decline, to follow
the hours around the earth, as she "spins beneath her pyramid of night,"
to feel the pulses of ocean, to pursue the course of its currents and
its changes, to measure the power, direction, and duration of mysterious
and invisible influences, and to assign constant and regular periods to
the seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and
night, which we know shall not cease, till the universe be no more. It
may be thought we are exaggerating the effects of a science which is yet
in its infancy. But it must be remembered that we are not speaking of
its attained, but of its attainable power: it is the young Hercules for
the fostering of whose strength the Meteorological Society has been
formed.

282. There is one point, it must now be observed, in which the science
of meteorology differs from all others. A Galileo, or a Newton, by the
unassisted workings of his solitary mind, may discover the secrets of
the heavens, and form a new system of astronomy. A Davy in his lonely
meditations on the crags of Cornwall, or in his solitary laboratory,
might discover the most sublime mysteries of nature, and trace out the
most intricate combinations of her elements. But the meteorologist is
impotent if alone; his observations are useless; for