were commenced, and since then have been exchanged in semi-monthly communications. These reports, steadily increasing, now cover the combined territorial extent of Algiers, Australasia, Austria, Belgium, Central America, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Greenland, Iceland, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunis, Turkey, British North America, the United States, the Azores, Malta, Mauritius, the Sandwich Islands, South Africa, South America, and the West Indies, so far as they have been put under meteorological observation. On July 1, 1875, the daily issue of a printed bulletin, exhibiting these international simultaneous reports, was commenced at the Army Signal-Office in Washington, and has since been maintained. A copy of this "International Bulletin" is furnished each cooperating observer. This publication combines for the first time of which we have any record the joint labors of the nations in a research of this kind for their mutual benefit. As the network of cooperating stations already spreads over so vast a proportion of the land-surface of the globe, there is needed only the more general cooperation of the naval and merchant fleets of the world to supply ample data for a comprehensive study of the atmosphere as a unit. This need is now growingly appreciated, and nine series of marine reports, each containing the simultaneous observations of a number of sea-going vessels,[1] have been added to supplement the similar reports contributed by the land-observers, swelling the total observational force to 500 laborers. The harvest of physical data already garnered by this force, and daily increasing, will be invaluable for all future weather investigations. As the Committee of the Scottish Meteorological Society recently said, "This truly cosmopolitan work, which the United States are alone in a position to undertake, thanks to the liberality and enterprise of their Government, will bring before us month by month the general circulation of the earth's atmosphere, and raise if it does not satisfy many inquiries lying at the very root of meteorology, and intimately affecting those atmospheric changes which meteorologists have been recording." It will greatly enrich the meteorology of the ocean and aid navigation, by supplying data for deducing those true mean physical values which teach the mariner at sea where he may find "a fair wind and a favorable current," how he may best utilize the forces of nature and elude its terrors. It will afford material for the renovation of the climatology and sanitary meteorology of regions not now fully investigated. But, above all, it will facilitate the elucidation of the laws of storms and those associate phenomena which conspire to produce the many-colored phases of "the weather."
The cardinal object of this vast scientific enterprise, as the reader may anticipate, is the study of the atmosphere as a unit. The atmospheric ocean must be viewed by every thinking mind as a whole, whose
- ↑ The number of marine observers now exceeds one hundred.
