for a district extending from 63° east to 60° west longitude, and from 30° to 75° north latitude, whence accurate information was seldom obtainable by telegraph in western Europe. Although these charts did not at first repay the outlay made upon them, they were so well received by the meteorologists of Europe as to encourage their continuance. Their scope was enlarged in 1875, in accordance with the advice of the directors of various central institutions, so as to embrace a more considerable part of the globe, and give some idea of the distribution of temperature. Mercator's projection was discarded, in order to avoid the exaggerations of dimensions in northern regions; and other improvements in detail were made. These synoptical charts, giving observations made three times a day in Denmark, Faroe, Iceland, and Greenland, were continued for more than three years, or till November, 1876, at Captain Hoffmeyer's personal expense. Arrangements had been made in the summer of 1883 to resume the publication, in conjunction with Neumayer, and the first sheets of the new series were printed on the day after that of Hoffmeyer's death.
Captain Hoffmeyer was a worker in meteorology rather than a writer of papers and books on the subject. The service that he did is best seen in the organization of a system of stations at intervals across the ocean wherever his country had jurisdiction; in the conception of his synoptical charts; in the regular publication of the Meteorological Bulletin of Denmark, described in Nature as in several respects among the best that reached it; and in his co-operation in the formation and movement of the International Meteorological Congress. He was one of the secretaries of the meeting at Rome in 1876; and was a member, appointed by the Vienna Congress of 1873, and a secretary of the Conference for Maritime Meteorology that met in London in 1874. He also made some valuable literary contributions to the science. Among these are his papers on the Greenland Foehn, 1877, and on the distribution of atmospheric pressure in winter over the North Atlantic, and its influence on the climate of Europe, 1878. The former of the papers related to the sudden changes of temperature which mark the winter climate of Greenland, under which the mean temperatures of that season sometimes vary almost as much as 23° C. in different years, and Upernavik is sometimes as warm during the darkness of the polar night as the south of France. Sudden and sharp changes often occur several times in the course of the same month; and the rises always stand in connection with a veering of the wind to southeast and east. The phenomenon of a warm wind blowing from an interior which is covered with snow and ice has then to be accounted for. The older authors, to explain the paradox, re-
