The first address which Maury delivered on the plan for land meteorological observations was at the fair of the Memphis Agricultural and Mechanical Society, on October 17, 1871. In this speech he said that he had dropped the subject at Brussels because the Royal Society of London had advised against it, but that he had ever since regretted this action because he had learned that all Europe had been with him except Bavaria. He then showed how the machinery for putting the scheme into operation in the United States already existed. “You have your Signal Office”, he declared, “where weather reports are continually received by telegraph, and whence telegraphic forecasts are issued daily.... You have also the Agricultural Bureau, in the service of which reports embodying many of the facts and observations required are already made, or might be without any additional expense.... Do you mean to say that amid all the mind, means, and appliances of the age, the relations between the weather and the crops are past finding out? If I could, with just such a system of researches for the sea, sit down in my office and tell the navigator how he would find the wind, at any season of the year, in any part of the ocean through which he wished to sail, am I promising too much when I tell you that by the plan I now propose the relation between the weather and the crops is as capable of scientific development as were the relations between sea-voyages and the winds twenty-five years ago?” At the close of the address, resolutions were offered that the United States government be petitioned through the State Department in favor of the establishment through international coöperation of a plan of universal telegraphic meteorological observations and crop reports, and that another conference similar to that of Brussels in 1853 be called for that purpose. The different reaction of two of Maury’s friends to this speech is interesting. Rutson Maury wrote, “A large part of your Memphis Address that deals with mercantile matters is sheer nonsense.... You ought to have some Sancho Panza to accompany you when you go a-tilting”. Being a New Yorker, he would naturally not be in sympathy with an effort to deflect even a small part of its trade from that metropolis. Dr. Tremlett’s opinion of the speech was more complimentary. “I have”, he wrote, “read your last ‘spread eagle’ at Memphis. Capital, clever, business-like like everything you do; but unrealizable”.