The health of mankind, navigation, agriculture, commerce, the hourly business and needs of every man, from the merchant sending out his cargo and the consumptive waiting for death in the east wind, to the laundress hanging out the family wash, are ruled by that most mysterious, most uncurbed of powers, the weather. We may rub along through life with scanty knowledge of the history of dead nations or the philosophy of living ones, but heat and cold, the climate of the coming winter, yesterday's rainfall or to-morrow's frost, are matters which take hold of every one of us and affect us every hour of the day. Now, to bring the known general truths of this science to practical rules, or to base upon them predictions of storms or changes in the weather during any future period, requires, as Sir John Herschel stated twelve years ago, "patient, incessant and laborious observations, carried on in every region of the globe." One reason why this is required is the perpetually shifting conditions of heat, wind and storm. A man who sat down to work a mathematical problem in the days of Job, if there was such a man, found its result just the same as the school-boy does to-day: figures not only never lie, but never alter. But the man who solves an equation of which the winds and waters are members finds that the sum to be added varies with every hour. There are, so far as is yet known, no regularly recurring cycles of weather on which to base predictions: the conditions of heat and wind and moisture are never precisely the same at any given point. Hence the necessity, if we would give the science stability and bring it to bear on our daily life, of educated, skilled observers at different points to collect and report simultaneously the daily details of the present conditions. It is this daily detail of fact which the United States government supplies through the little stations of observation one of which we have stumbled into on the Jersey beach. Americans, indeed, have from the first taken hold of this science with a most characteristic effort to reduce it to practical uses, to bring it at once to bear on the well-being at least of farmers and navigators. Dove had no sooner published his chart of isothermal lines and charts, showing the temperature throughout the world of each month, and also of abnormal temperatures, than our government issued the _Army Meteorological Register_ for the United States, which for accuracy and fullness had never been equaled. In these the temperature and rainfall for each month of the year were shown. The forecasts of the weather now published daily in this country, and which come so directly home to every man's business that Old Probabilities is a real personage to us all, have been given in England for several years under the supervision of Admiral Fitzroy.