failure; the company surrendered its charter, and the settlements were absorbed by the New Zealand Government. They nevertheless contributed greatly to the colonization of a country then covered with forests and occupied by cannibals. Together with the two ecclesiastical provinces of Otago and Canterbury, they have communicated the energy and self-reliance that distinguish the "Britain of the South."
If the foregoing classification of colonial origins be correct, two conclusions necessarily follow: First, colonial societies in their mature state have not been developed out of the primitive loose aggregations of various kinds which everywhere sprang up in favorable circumstances, but are rather founded upon them, as the Pliocene on the Miocene strata. Next, the part which intention and design, conscious and organized action, have played in social evolution is greater than sociologists have hitherto been willing to admit. And as, in virtue of the law that the development of an individual is a recapitulation of the development of its ancestral species, the genesis of colonies is a rehearsal of the genesis of all societies, social origins will have to be studied a little less from imagination and a good deal more from history than has yet been attempted.
| WEATHER FORECASTS: THE MANNER OF MAKING THEM AND THEIR PRACTICAL VALUE. |
By E. J. PRINDLE.
WE are not always conscious of the great influence which the weather exerts on our affairs. Fair weather gives zest and interest to everything, while dark clouds depress us and take the life and sparkle from that which was before most attractive. In cases of severe illness the weather sometimes makes all the difference between life and death. Our emotions are largely under its control. The farmer's first thought in the morning and his last consciousness at night relate to the weather. The sailor, the pleasure seeker, the shopper, and the builder are all deeply concerned with the weather, to say nothing of the children, whose lives are quickly limited to the four walls of the house on the approach of bad weather.
It is a matter of so much concern that our Government spends annually about nine hundred thousand dollars for the maintenance of its Weather Bureau, in order that we may know a few hours beforehand what to expect of the elements.
The first attempt at scientific forecasting of the weather was the result of a storm which, during the Crimean War, November 14,
