In the history of superstitious practices weather-making plays a prominent part. Sir J. G. Frazer, in that great storehouse of myth and folklore, “The Golden Bough,” says: “Of the things which the public magician sets himself to do for the good of the tribe, one of the chief is to control the weather and especially to insure an adequate fall of rain. In savage communities the rain-maker is a very important personage; and often a special class of magicians exists for the purpose of regulating the heavenly water supply.” Frazer devotes ninety pages of his work to a rapid survey of the superstitious methods of controlling the weather that have found credence among the various races of mankind. These range all the way from the most complicated ceremonies to the summary expedient of throwing a passing stranger into a river to bring rain. The sailor who whistles or scratches the mast to raise a wind is merely keeping up a quaint custom, in the efficacy of which he may or may not put some lingering faith, but which the world at large long since ceased to take seriously. When, however, a vessel master attempts to disperse a waterspout by firing a cannon at it, he is doing what nine educated persons out of ten would probably do under the circumstances. Yet one process is no more futile than the other, and both are based on superstition. Ages ago sailors sought to frighten waterspouts away by pointing knives at them, or by shouts and the clashing of swords, and the use of cannon originally embodied the same idea of terrifying the watery monster. It is our purpose in the present chapter to describe especially several processes of weather-making which, while not obviously chimerical from the point of view of the layman, have been more or less positively discredited through the scrutiny of men of science.