The Weather Bureau is a bureau of information, and one of the ways in which it strives to give a good account of itself is by answering endless questions about “the year without a summer.” This title has been given to the year 1816. Blodget, in his “Climatology of the United States,” tells us that all the summers from 1811 to 1817 were cold in this country, and that in every month of the summers of both 1812 and 1816 snows and frosts occurred in the Northern States. It is the latter summer, however, that has lived in popular tradition. The year 1816 is known further as “poverty year,” or “eighteen hundred and froze to death.” It acquired the name of “mackerel year” in New Hampshire, where people ate mackerel as a substitute for pork, little of which was fattened on account of the extreme scarcity of corn. Western Europe, also, had a cold summer in 1816, and the year as a whole seems to have been a cold one over a great part of the world. Sources of information about the cold summer in this country, besides Blodget’s book above mentioned, include Perley’s “Historic Storms of New England,” which devotes a whole chapter to the subject, and Charles Peirce’s “Weather in Philadelphia.” Peirce tells us that at Philadelphia “there was ice during every month of the year, not excepting June, July, and August, There was scarcely a vegetable came to perfection north and east of the Potomac.” According to the “Monthly Weather Review,” citing the recollections of James Winchester, of Vermont: “It is said that in June of that year snow fell to the depth of three inches in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey on the 17th; five inches in all the New England States, except three inches in Vermont. There was snow and ice in every month of this year. The storm of June 17 was as severe as any that ever occurred in the depth of winter; it began about noon, increasing in fury until night, by which time the roads were impassable by reason of snowdrifts; many were bewildered in the blinding storm and frozen to death.... There was a heavy snowstorm August 30th.... The year 1816 had neither spring, summer, nor autumn. The only crop of corn raised in that part of Vermont that summer was saved by keeping bonfires burning around the cornfield night and day.” At the time of its occurrence the frigid weather of the summer of 1816 was popularly attributed to sun spots, which were big enough to be seen with the naked eye in May and June. A present-day hypothesis on the subject has been mentioned in our chapter on atmospheric dust. The dust cloud from the eruption of Tomboro, in 1815, was so vast that for three days there was darkness at a distance of 300 miles from the volcano.