Page:A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury.pdf/89

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SCHEME FOR AGRICULTURAL METEOROLOGY.
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present to offering you the tribute of acknowledgments due you for so many years.

Your very humble and obedient servant,

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT.

At the age of eighty-seven years.

After his return from the Brussels Conference, Maury continued to push his ideas and plans for meteorological cooperation on the land as well as on the sea; and in 1855 he delivered addresses before many agricultural societies of the South and West in which he urged the farmers to make daily observations (according to a uniform plan then set forth by Maury) on temperature, the force and direction of winds, storms, &c., and on the condition and yield of the crops, and to send them to him, as the sailors had done, to be made into land charts. Also to memorialize Congress for appropriations to establish a central office where these weather and crop reports could be digested and telegraphed monthly, weekly, or even daily, to all parts of the country, and "the farmers be thus warned of the approach of storms, severe frosts, &c., that might prove injurious to the crops."

On Jan. 10th, 1856, Maury addressed the United States Agricultural Society at Washington on this subject, and in the course of his remarks said:—"Now, sir, it may be asked, what have farmers to do with meteorology? I would answer, everything. The atmosphere is a great basin which envelops this globe, and every plant and animal that grows thereon is dependent for its well being upon the laws which govern and control the 'wind in its circuits,' and none more so than man, the lord of all. To study these laws, we must treat the atmosphere as a whole. We have now the sea made white with floating observatories all equipped with instruments that are comparable, observing the same things according to a uniform method, and recording these observations according to a universal plan. In the process of