A special questionnaire investigation on nephelopsychosis made some years ago by G. Stanley Hall and the writer (9) indicated that heavy black clouds and fogs may often strike fear or terror into children, or may make them feel depressed and gloomy or restless. Some children experience “terrible fear” at times and others feel that “something dreadful will happen when the horrible black ones appear.” There are cases on record of actual motor paralysis caused by terrifying clouds. There is here an interesting parallelism between the emotional responses called out by clouds in the children of to-day and the responses called out in primitive races. In his mythopoetic tendency primitive man read fear and danger in dark clouds, particularly the black thunder clouds. The smoke clouds of our city probably depress children just as any dark clouds do, and when particularly black may also arouse nephelophobias. Sir Archibald Geikie has ascribed the subdued, grim character of the Scot to the gloom of his valleys and the canopy of cloud “which for a large part of the year cuts off the light and heat of the sun.” The French formerly regarded the Englishmen as “rude, unlettered ... surly, ill-conditioned men, having lived in an unhappy climate where perpetual fog, only varied by rain, prevented the sun from ever being seen, suffering from so deep and inveterate a melancholy that physicians had called it the English spleen, and under the influence of this cruel malady constantly committing suicide, particularly in November, when we were well known to hang and shoot ourselves by the thousands” (2). On the other hand, there are those who believe that the monotonous gloom of England has inoculated the Britain against moods of depression and hypochondria, and made for the evenness of temperament which is said to characterize him (18). Gloomy weather would thus serve as a catharsis against the very depressions which it is said to induce. I must confess that this reasoning seems to me to be quite specious. The effects of meteorological monotony, particularly of depressing states, probably do not differ from the general effects of physiological or psychic monotony: narcosis, hypnosis, fatigue, overstrain, distaste, or aversion. However that may be, there can be no doubt that many persons experience an exhilarating, tonic effect on a bright, sunshiny day and a depressing influence on gloomy days--assertions that have, indeed, been ridiculed by Dr. Johnson. Fortunately these impressionistic views on the buoyancy of sunshine and on the depression of gloom (particularly cold or hot, damp, dark days) find a certain degree of support in scientific studies.