Maury often lectured to the students of Virginia Military Institute, though he gave no regular courses of instruction; for example, in 1872 he gave a series of lectures to the cadets on “What We Owe to Science”. The larger number of his addresses were delivered, however, in the interest of the establishment of a system of universal telegraphic meteorological observations and crop reports,—the plan which he had urged for many years before the Civil War and which that unhappy conflict had cut short. Not long after his return to Virginia, he began to consider this cherished plan again. “You remember before the war”, he wrote, “how hard I tried to get up a Telegraphic Meteorological Bureau—writing and lecturing about it—now as meteorology for the farmers, now as storm-signals combined with crop statistics. When I was in England, during the war, I proposed to Fitzroy, and after his death to his successor, Toynbee, a plan for making, by means of an elastic cloth stretched over his map, a caste of the atmosphere, so that he might take in his whole field of observation at a single glance, and so predict with more certainty. Suppose, for instance, with his map pasted on a table, he had bored a hole through London, Liverpool, Portsmouth, etc., and stuck up in each place a little rod graduated for the barometer; that his elastic cloth was then fitted to a slide so that he could set it at the height of the barometer at each of the stations. Fancy each rod to be surmounted by a wind-vane which could be drawn out or shoved in, to show the force of the wind at each place. Thus you would have a ‘caste of the atmosphere’, and see all about it. Brooke—‘deep-sea lead’—has suggested just such a plan to Myer (General Albert James Myer of the Signal Bureau in Washington); and Myer, I have heard, has adopted it. The idea, I think, was as original with Brooke as it was with me”.